PKI Standards Work

The dominant PKI-related standards can be found at the following organisations and working groups.

PKIX - the public key working group of the IETF

IETF Security Area

IETF S/MIME Mail Security (see also the Internet Mail Consortium S/MIME site)

IETF Transport Layer Security (TLS)

IEEE Standards for Public Key Cryptography

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The basic idea of PKI -- which can be thought of as a coordinated suite of technlogies, standards, management processes and agreements -- has led to numerous spin off approaches. Some like SPKI ("Simple PKI") have attempted to streamline the approach at the certificate protocol level. Others have deployed the basic elements in different form factors, such as wireless.

While PKI has been feared by many as being inherently privacy invasive (see for example some of Roger Clarke's work), much work has been done to either manage and design PKIs to be safe with regards to privacy (see e.g. Australian Government PKI Privacy Guidelines) or to proactively enhance privacy using PKI technology (e.g. Privacy Positive Aspects).

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There are a great many introductions to PKI available online (and in text books).

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