The concept of a PKI (public key infrastructure) has been around for decades, but it is one strand of IT which has taken an extraordinarily long time to come to fruition within the mainstream. This is mostly because implementing a PKI is time consuming and difficult. Maintaining a PKI is equally time consuming and even more difficult within the real world of mergers and acquisitions against a backdrop of ever-changing technology. Many organisations simply give up and hand everything over to a third party who promises to manage everything on their behalf. This is generally not a good idea and simply delays the inevitability of failures and misunderstood complexity. This book explores all the aspects of implementing and maintaining a PKI that the other books on the subject seem to miss. It reflects decades of hard-won experience, not only in PKI, not only in IT, not only in electronics, but in business, government agencies and academia alike. The book also explores the existence of a PKI alongside other technologies, such as biometrics, and against an ever-changing world of development methodologies. This last point is particularly relevant at this time as we are in the middle of a quiet, but all encompassing revolution in this respect. Consequently, this is the one book on PKI that you have to have on your shelf, whether you be a company director, IT manager, government minister or teacher of IT. It is the book which fills in all the gaps left in the literature and treads paths which others fear to tread. You will enjoy it enormously if you are from an IT background.
1. What exactly is a PKI? The original concept
2. How does PKI work? The nuts and bolts of PKI
3. What are the primary applications for a PKI? How applications are changing
4. What exactly is a digital certificate? The contents of a certificate
5. What about encryption? How a public key infrastructure is used for encryption
6. Biometrics and PKI: The possibilities of biometric certificates
7. What is the conventional wider infrastructure? Different infrastructure models explained
8. Kubernetes, containers and PKI: The container model and its implications for PKI
9. Trust and certificates: The original concept has changed
10. How may a localised infrastructure work? Keeping things simple
11. What happens when certificates expire? What can go wrong?
12. How do we ensure that certificates do not expire? Methodologies for security
13. How does the human interaction work? Managing things manually
14. Can we organise everything ourselves? Understanding what to do
15. How long does it take to implement a proper PKI? Understanding the scale of the problem
16. What skills are required for operational personnel? Understanding associated technologies
17. How do we embed a PKI culture in the workplace? Communication
18. How do we keep it working as we grow? Planning and documentation
19. What happens if we acquire other companies? Merging public key infrastructures
20. Who should be responsible for it all? Accountability
21. PKI, the cloud and the Internet of things: What we should understand
22. PKI and the global financial industry: The reliance upon a large-scale public key infrastructure
23. PKI and government legislation: Ensuring that legislation is compatible
24. Consequences: What happens when it all goes wrong
Biography
Julian Ashbourn is a prolific literary author with many popular titles in both the arts and sciences, including poetry and philosophy. He is also an experienced audio engineer and a composer with more than 50 full-scale symphonic works to his credit, in addition to other genres. Julian is also a qualified geoscientist and loves nature and anything within the natural world or connected with the sciences. In the IT field, Julian is an acknowledged expert on biometrics, encryption and infrastructure. He has had a varied career, working all over the world, often troubleshooting systems, from Arabia and Africa to Australia, Russia, Japan and almost every European country. The last 20 years of his career were spent in the aviation industry where he supported projects around a very large IT infrastructure, working on just about every scenario including, of course, PKI.
