Enterprise PKI - At the X-road

["Anders Rundgren" <anders.rundgren@telia.com>]

Dear List,
There are indeed some recognized hurdles to PKI deployment.

However, there also are some very serious obstacles that most
PKI advocates seem to be unaware of:

- Assume that you are working for a large organization
- Assume that this organization has an internal purchasing system
  holding a local product catalog
- Assume that this system authenticates users as well as checking limits etc.
    (that's why you have enterprise systems)
- Assume that it is time to order some stuff from an external supplier

Question:  How would such a purchasing system be able to carry out
its message creation, monitoring, archiving, and control tasks if you
use a true end-to-end encryption model?

Answer: It cannot.

===============================================
That is, the enterprise PKI model is incompatible with essentially
every business process and system used by the private sector.
===============================================

But there is no reason to despair, the private sector have already
an architecture in place since decades back that is very easy to
augment with PKI.   For a reasonably complete description on
how to make business systems use PKI, please take a peek at the
following recently upgraded document:

http://w1.181.telia.com/~u18116613/pki4org.pdf

Best
Anders R