Infrastructure

We identify end-user digital certificate management as a vulnerability in public key infrastructure (PKI) which threatens the trust assurance abilities of any PKI system relying on digital certificates for authentication purposes. Since trust in PKI is inherited in a top-down approach from a known or trusted certification authority (CA), PKI’s trust hierarchy abstracts trust from the end user. We argue that the CA trust hierarchy implementation, while important for enabling trust between unknown parties, does not provide an acceptable level of authentication and therefore causes PKI’s claim of non-repudiation to fail. This paper presents a case, and potential solutions, for improved authentication in PKI through secure certificate management