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

The Role of Standards, Profiles, and Interoperability Testing

It has been said that a camel is actually a horse designed by committee. Although this may seem a bit disparaging to some, we invoke this anecdote to illustrate the difficulties typically encountered when attempting to reach agreement on the numerous technical (and sometimes political) issues that arise during the standards process. It should be noted that we are not trying to "bash" standards. In fact, standards play a critical role. We are simply trying to make it clear that standards alone are not always sufficient to guarantee multi-vendor interoperability.

Standards come in a variety of forms, and there are numerous standards bodies that engage in the development of these standards. ...