Approaches to Open, Interoperable, and Interchangeable Interfaces for Managing Private-Key Cryptographic Data

One of the current impediments to the wide-spread use of public-key infrastructure is the practice by commercial-sector suppliers of public-key infrastructure of using proprietary and non-standard interfaces for the management of private-key data. The ability to interchange components is required to allow research to continue to occur in a production environment through the use of alternate implementations of components. We argue that open and interoperable interfaces must be provided for all widely-used components of PKI in order to support diverse security architectures and applications, and that sufficient practice and draft standards exist that provide a substantial basis for these required open interfaces. Motivation In order to provide public-key services to a wide variety of applications, several interfaces and data formats must be standardized. In particular, open interfaces that use the private keys for standard signing and authentication; standard encodings of identity cert..