Public Key Infrastructure

Abstract

PrefaceThis book contains the proceedings of the 5th European Public Key Infrastructure Workshop: Theory and Practice, EuroPKI 2008, which was held on the NTNU campus Gløshaugen in Trondheim, Norway, in June 2008.The EuroPKI workshop series focuses on all research and practice aspects of public key infrastructures, services and applications, and welcomes original research papers and excellent survey contributions from academia, government, and industry.Simply put, public keys are easier to distribute than secret keys. Nevertheless, constructing effective, practical, secure and low cost means for assuring authenticity and validity of public keys used in large-scale networked services remains both a technological and organizational challenge. In a nutshell, this is the PKI problem, and the papers presented herein propose new solutions and insight for these questions.This volume holds 16 refereed papers including the presentation paper by the invited speaker P. Landrock. In response to the EuroPKI 2008 call for papers, a total of 37 paper proposals were received. All submissions underwent a thorough blind review by at least three PC members, resulting in a careful selection and revision of the accepted papers. The authors came from 10 countries: Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Finland, Germany, Japan, Malaysia, Norway, Spain, and the USA. The accepted papers were organized into the topical sessions: Invited Talk, Certificates, Authentication, Practice, Signatures, Analysis, and Networks.The use and exploitation of large-scale public key infrastructures have arrived at a slower tempo and perhaps in other directions than originally envisioned a decade ago. A case in point, only 2 out of 16 authors in this workshop found it convenient to provide a digital signature on the copyright transfer form for the submitted paper. So we are not there yet! We thank all the people who contributed to this workshop: the authors, the invited speaker, the members of the Program Committee, the members of the Organization Committee, the staff at Springer, the sponsors for their support, and finally all the workshop participants. They all made this workshop successful. The challenge is to prevent double spending without the use of a central registry to keep track of ownership. The second is a new light way digital signature scheme which seems to work well with tamper resistant hardware, but not in software, where it can be broken. We briefly discuss how to make use of this in a transparent PKI solution to be employed by vehicles, which appears to be a hot research topic. Finally we introduce the concept of a digital signature server with central storage of user keys and a central signing facility only, which is operated at the full control of the user using a secure channel for proper authentication. The first and last scenarios have both been deployed in live systems and have been patented, in contrast to the light weight digital signature.