Abstract:
Public key infrastructure (PKI), comprised of X.509 certificates (PKIX) and cryptographic protocols, helps ensure secure communications for the Web. The creation of PKI is a fascinating story that dates back to the 1970s and came about thanks to people with a strong desire to democratize privacy and security on the Internet. PKIX became the model implementation for PKI that included a fundamental, openly de ned, digital certificate. This paper offers an overview of PKIX for a general audience. It also encourages students to explore some of these ideas, with a discussion on modeling and simulation of costs associated with certificate validation, and some computational number theory.
