With the increasing focus on IT Security comes a higher demand for identity management in the modern business. This requires a flexible, scalable, and secure authentication method. Identity control is made mandatory by many public standards, such as PCI, and PKI is an essential component to set up authentication in many technologies, such as VPN. Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) plays a key role in achieving the required degree of security and scalability. Other approaches have been either scalable but not secure, or secure but not scalable. Not only does PKI provide the framework for security and scalability, it also is a standard adaptable for the coming years. This book’s unique approach illustrates the techniques to practically apply PKI into solutions while developing the foundational concepts of the technology. Consequently, this book makes deploying this complex and essential technology simple.

This book is tailored to enable you to deploy PKI-based solutions in a simple, efficient, and manageable way. The book achieves this goal by taking a layered approach. First, it presents the foundations of PKI to ensure that you have the required theoretical background to properly understand the mechanisms. Then the book modularly takes those foundations into generic design considerations: The goal is to help you to perform the choices most suitable for the targeted environment; guidance is provided through sharing best practices and experiences acquired in production customer deployments. Those design modules are pieced together into hierarchical models, which are then applied to comprehensive solutions. Through the book, troubleshooting sections are included to ensure smooth implementations and enable you to gain a deep understanding of the internals.