ABSTRACT
While public key infrastructure (PKI) technology is now widely understood, it is still a very complicated IT project that costs well in excess of $800,000 to implement. Nevertheless, PKI technology has been heralded as one of the best ways to authenticate data and keep it confidential. Its major components (a registration authority that verifies a user’s identity and a certificate authority that issues digital certificates and a storage repository) are now widely understood. However, understanding the components does not make PKI easy to implement. In fact, because of the technology’s complexities, few enterprises have moved past pilot testing to full-scale, enterprisewide deployment.
