The Research And Design Of A PKI System

Applied Cryptography is essential for security. The lack of an effective solution to the problem of secret key management inhibited the wide use of Secret Key Cryptography in security practice. The emergence of Public Key Cryptography solves the key management problem whereas it introduces another problem, the verification of public key authenticity. Public Key Infrastructure(PKI) solves the problem effectively through certification, a process that binds a public key to a special entity.PKI enables us to apply cryptography theories into security practice. It is the substantial security foundation for online commerce and other applications that require authentication, confidentiality, integrity and non-repudation in an open network.PKI's fundamental theories and concepts, essential design issues, current application and development are firstly described in this thesis. Then the design and implementation of a practical PKI system are presented. The design of the system conforms to essential PKI related standards and the final model system is a secure, fully functional, platform independent, modular and scalable PKI built on J2EE platform.