Understanding Public-Key Infrastructure: Concepts, Standards, and Deployment Considerations

Operational Considerations

A number of operational considerations must be taken into account when a PKI is associated with its core services of authentication, integrity, and confidentiality. These include the following:

• Performance

• On-line versus off-line operation

• Commonality of underlying algorithms

• Entity naming

Each of these is described further in the following subsections.

Performance

Public-key operations are significantly slower than symmetric key operations. Thus, although an encryption public key theoretically can be used to encrypt large quantities of data, in a practical system it is virtually never used for this purpose. Rather, the data is encrypted using a symmetric key, and that key is encrypted in a single operation using an ...