Entrust Technologies
Trusted Public-Key Infrastructures
Author: Ian Curry
Date: December 1997
Version: 1.1
© Entrust Technologies Limited, 1997
1
Public-Key Infrastructures
Introduction
As organizations look to gain competitive advantage by improving their products and
services, technology related to digital signatures and security of information is an
attractive option. In the past few years, public-key technology has become the
preferred means for providing these capabilities. Public-key technology provides a
variety of critical enabling capabilities for electronic business processes. Through
encryption, public-key technology provides confidentiality and access control.
Through digital signatures, the technology provides the following features:
• trusted authentication. Trusted authentication means users can securely identify
themselves to other users and servers on a network without sending secret
information (for example, passwords) over the network.
• data integrity. Data integrity means that the verifier of a digital signature can
easily determine whether or not digitally signed data has been altered since it was
signed.
• support for non-repudiation. Support for non-repudiation means that the user
who signed data cannot successfully deny signing that data.
Each capability is required to effectively move business processes from the paper-
based world to the electronic world, and to improve existing electronic processes. The
rest of this paper elaborates on the elements that allow businesses to take advantage
of public-key technology. In particular, this paper concentrates on the following items:
• the concept of a public-key infrastructure
• the requirements for implementing an effective, comprehensive public-key
infrastructure.
What is a public-key infrastructure?
The comprehensive system required to provide public-key encryption and digital
signature services is known as a public-key infrastructure (PKI).
The purpose of a public-key infrastructure is to manage keys and certificates. By
managing keys and certificates through a PKI, an organization establishes and
maintains a trustworthy networking environment. A PKI enables the use of encryption
and digital signature services across a wide variety of applications.
Note: This paper assumes the reader has a basic understanding of public-key
cryptography. To get a brief overview of cryptography, refer to the White
Paper titled An Introduction to Cryptography, available on the Entrust
Technologies Web site at http://www.entrust.com/library.htm.
What is an effective public-key infrastructure?
There are a number of requirements that businesses have with respect to implementing
effective public-key infrastructures. First and foremost, if users cannot take advantage
of encryption and digital signatures in applications, a PKI is not valuable.
Consequently, the most important constraint on a PKI is transparency. The term
transparency means that users do not have to understand how the PKI manages keys
and certificates to take advantage of encryption and digital signature services. An
effective PKI is transparent.
In addition to user transparency, a business must implement the following items in a
PKI to provide the required key and certificate management services:
• public key certificates
2
Public-Key Infrastructures
• a certificate repository
• certificate revocation
• key backup and recovery
• support for non-repudiation of digital signatures
• automatic update of key pairs and certificates
• management of key histories
• support for cross-certification
• client-side software interacting with all of the above in a secure, consistent, and
trustworthy manner.
Note: In this paper, the term client-side refers to application clients and application
servers. PKI requirements are the same for both application clients and
servers, and both are “clients” of the infrastructure services described in this
paper.
The remaining sections of this paper define each of the requirements listed above. All
of these requirements must be met for an organization implementing a PKI to establish
and maintain a trustworthy environment. All of these requirements must also be met to
have an automatic, transparent, and usable PKI.
Certificates and Certification Authorities
For public-key cryptography to be valuable, users must be assured that the other
parties with whom they communicate are “safe”—that is, their identities and keys are
valid and trustworthy. To provide this assurance, all users of a PKI must have a
registered identity. These identities are stored in a digital format known as a public key
certificate. Certification Authorities (CAs) represent the people, processes, and tools
to create digital certificates that securely bind the names of users to their public keys.
In creating certificates, CAs act as agents of trust in a PKI. As long as users trust a
CA and its business policies for issuing and managing certificates, they can trust
certificates issued by the CA. This is known as third-party trust. For more information
on third-party trust, refer to the Entrust Technologies White Paper titled The Concept
of Trust in Network Security. This White Paper is available on the Entrust
Technologies Web site at http://www.entrust.com/library.htm.
CAs create certificates for users by digitally signing a set of data that includes the
following information (and additional items):
• the user’s name in the format of a distinguished name (DN). The DN specifies the
user’s name and any additional attributes required to uniquely identify the user
(for example, the DN could contain the user’s employee number).
• a public key of the user. The public key is required so that others can encrypt for
the user or verify the user’s digital signature.
• the validity period (or lifetime) of the certificate (a start date and an end date).
• the specific operations for which the public key is to be used (whether for
encrypting data, verifying digital signatures, or both).
The CA’s signature on a certificate ensures that any tampering with the contents of the
certificate can be easily detected. (The CA’s signature on a certificate is like a tamper-
detection seal on a bottle of pills—any tampering with the contents of a certificate is
easily detected) As long as the CA’s signature on a certificate can be verified, the
certificate has integrity. Since the integrity of a certificate can be determined by