Interoperability in PKI

With increasing emphasis and reliance upon everything from VPNs and ecommerce to remote access and authentication, PKI is rapidly becoming an essential piece of the information age. However, there are several factors that have kept PKI from widespread deployment including confusion about what makes up a PKI, the complex and costly implementations, and immature industry standards and incompatibility among those standards. In the environment of electronic communication, the establishment of trust depends on electronic or digital objects and processes and procedures that manage them. This paper will introduce some of the interoperability issues in PKI which applies to processing and managing the establishment of those trust and the challenges it faces.