Security without Obscurity

Chapter 7

Operational Considerations

This chapter addresses operational issues relating to public key infrastructure architectures, business continuity, disaster recovery, and third-party service providers. The ability to quickly stand up a new certificate authority (CA) or decommission a CA within an existing hierarchy is as important as building a whole new CA hierarchy. Maintaining the existing CA infrastructure can also be a challenge. In the previous chapters, we discussed various topics that might enhance or influence PKI operations:

• Chapter 1, “Introduction,” presented the convergence of legal matters, business rules, information technology (IT), and cryptography within PKI operations and the importance of standards. All four areas need ...