Certificates turn 30, X.509 turns 20, no-one notices

[Nicholas Bohm]

Peter Gutmann wrote:
> This doesn't seem to have garnered much attention, but this year marks two
> milestones in PKI: Loren Kohnfelder's thesis was published 30 years ago, and
> X.509v1 was published 20 years ago.
> 
> As a sign of PKI's successful penetration of the marketplace, the premier get-
> together for PKI folks, the IDtrust Symposium (formerly the PKI Workshop and
> now in its eighth year) authenticates participants with... username and
> password, for lack of a working PKI.
> 
> (OK, it's a bit of a cheap shot and it's been done before, but I thought it
> was especially significant this year :-).

I've never been quite sure whether "Public" qualifies "Key" or
"Infrastructure" - this may make a difference to what you count as a PKI.

SWIFT (interbank messaging), BOLERO (bills of lading) and CREST (dealing
in dematerialised stocks and shares) all use public key cryptography, I
believe, and have all been reasonably successful; but they are all
closed systems where each of the participants believes that it and the
others can stand the risk of contractually-imposed non-repudiation rules
(or they used to believe it, anyway).

But what these examples illustrate, by the lack of "open" comparables,
is the very limited utility of the technology.

Nicholas Bohm
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