Certificateless public key cryptography (CL-PKC) was proposed to overcome the weaknesses of the public key infrastructure (PKI) and identity-based cryptography (ID-PKC). In PKI, certificates are used to provide the authenticity of public keys. However, a PKI faces many challenges in practice, such as the scalability of the infrastructure and certificate management (distribution, revocation, sto...

Over time, in order to improve functionality or efficiency, new features have been added to the basic framework of public key infrastructures (PKIs). While these new features are useful, as with any other security critical application, new features can open the door for new types of attacks. In this paper, we will concentrate on those attacks against a PKI which allow an attacker to take advant...

Open networks allow users to communicate without any prior arrangements such as contractual agreement or organisation membership. However, the very nature of open networks makes authenticity difficult to verify. We show that authentication can not be based on public key certificates alone, but also needs to include the binding between the key used for certification and it’s owner, as well as th...

Purpose – To overview and discuss the technical, economical, legal, and social reasons why public key infrastructures (PKIs) have failed so far, summarizing the lessons learned, and giving expectations about the future development of the field. Design/methodology/approach – A detailed analysis of the developments in the PKI field, pointing out the achievements so far and the issues that still r...

The use of certi cate revocation lists (CRLs) to convey revocation state in public key infrastructures has long been the subject of debate. Centrally, opponents of the technology attribute a range of semantic and technical limitations to CRLs. In this paper, we consider arguments advising against the use of CRLs made principally by Rivest in his paper \Can we eliminate certi cate revocation lis...