Chapter 1. Purpose of this document

This document tries to serve as a source of information on Public Key Infrastructures (PKIs) and focuses on both of the theoretic and practical description of PKIs.

With relation to specific standards, the work of the PKIX Working Group is presented. There is an emphasis on these standards and there is an attempt to classify implementations according to the degree of compliance.

This document starts with an introduction on public–key cryptography. Then, it describes several publicly available implementations providing a feature by feature comparison.

There is a further discussion on security issues with accordance with PKIs.

The implementations are presented as an educational instrument to test the protocols, to provide a source of feedback and to enable the individual to learn more about the wonderfull world of PKIs.

Note

The latest version of this document can be found at the OSPKI Book WWW site .