Dartmouth University researchers have received Department of Homeland Security funding to make public key infrastructure easier to use for those looking to secure and authenticate network transactions.
Their PKI Resource Query Protocol (PRQR) is working its way through the IETF standards process.
"PRQP, very simply, provides a more distributed system for PKI; it works in a way to get trustworthy references in order to verify the PKI certificates of individuals or servers," says Massimiliano "Max" Pala, research fellow with ISTS and the Open Certificate Authority Lab director, in a statement.
Dartmouth researchers are involved in efforts to get organizations in the education universe to work together on PKI and trust each other. Scott Rea, senior PKI architect at Dartmouth, plays several key roles at the Higher Education Bridge Certificate Authority (HEBCA), which consists of eight higher education groups whose members trust each other's PKI certificates. Other consortia exist for organizations in healthcare, government, etc.
"PKI labors under the misconception that it's difficult," says Scott Rea, senior PKI architect at Dartmouth, in a statement. "PKI is most successful when it runs under the covers or in the background."
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Dartmouth and PGP
You know Pretty Good Privacy has been around a long, long time. It is free too!!!
PGP is Good, but it is not the solution
PGP is free and it has been around for a long, long time.. true. But so PKIs. The difference between PGP and PKI is that the latter scales a lot better than PGP and can be used across the whole internet.
PGP is great for small communities. Unfortunately it will never provide a solution capable of supporting billions of users. Moreover it lacks the "I" which is the Infrastructure: a very important part of authentication.
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