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

Client-Side Software

As discussed in Chapter 3, "The Concept of an Infrastructure," a PKI is, above all, an infrastructure. By definition, an infrastructure is an ubiquitous, "substrate" architecture that is engineered to solve a particular problem and offer a set of services to a wide range of "applications" that may make use of these services. The infrastructure offers consistency and uniformity with respect to these services, across the full range of potential "applications." For the PKI, these "applications" are the client applications, protocol engines, libraries, operating systems, and so on, that require security services such as authentication, integrity, confidentiality, notarization, and non-repudiation (see Chapter 4, "Core PKI Services: ...