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

Registration Authority

Although the registration function can be implemented directly with the CA component, it sometimes makes sense to offload the registration function to a separate component referred to as a Registration Authority (RA). For example, as the number of end-entities in a given PKI domain increases and/or the end-entities are widely dispersed geographically, the notion of centralized registration becomes problematic. Judicious deployment of multiple RAs (sometimes referred to as Local Registration Authorities, or LRAs) helps to solve this problem. The primary purpose of the RA is to offload certain functions from the CA to enhance scalability and decrease operational costs.

Although the functions implemented by the RA may vary, ...