Title: A mission-critical certification authority architecture for high reliability and response time

Authors: Luis Carlos Coronado-Garcia, Carlos Perez-Leguizamo

Addresses: Escuela Superior de Fisica y Matematicas, IPN/Banco de Mexico, Av. 5 de Mayo #2, Col. Centro, C.P. 06059, Mexico, D.F., Mexico. ' Banco de Mexico, Av. 5 de Mayo #2, Col. Centro, C.P. 06059, Mexico, D.F., Mexico

Abstract: A public key infrastructure (PKI) is a set of elements and procedures needed to manage digital certificates. A PKI must guarantee the reliability of its services, assuring the timeliness of its responses and the continuity of the service despite of the growth in the number of users and the presence of hardware or software failures. Avoiding duplication of public keys due to intentional or involuntary errors is mandatory in a PKI; hence, the verification of public keys uniqueness is a fundamental task. In this paper, we propose a model of a PKI deploying uniqueness verification based on autonomous decentralised systems (ADS) concepts, namely online expandability, online maintenance and fault tolerance. There are two main contributions of this paper; application of ADS concept in a PKI model and a software implementation of ADS architecture.

Keywords: public key infrastructure; PKI; autonomous decentralised systems; ADS; high reliability; fault tolerance; public key cryptography; mission-critical certification; uniqueness verification; public keys; response time.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCCBS.2011.038947

International Journal of Critical Computer-Based Systems, 2011 Vol.2 No.1, pp.6 - 24

Published online: 11 Mar 2015 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article