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

Deployment: Now or Later?

A number of trade journal articles and conference presentations suggest that PKI is still "in its infancy" and that caution should be exercised when making a deployment decision. Some of the criticism stems from the fear that the technology is still fairly new and that the necessary standards and interoperability testing facilities necessary to guarantee multi- vendor interoperability are only beginning to mature. However, these very same articles indicate that PKI is inevitably a "must-have" technology. We also see numerous statistics that imply electronic commerce will burgeon to hundreds of billions of dollars (in USD) worldwide by the year 2002. Many suggest that PKI will be an instrumental technology in realizing ...