REVIEW

Understanding Public-Key Infrastructure:
Concepts, Standards and Deployment Considerations
by Carlisle Adams and Steve Lloyd
$50.00 USA / $74.95 CAN
296 pages, hardbound

Historically books about network security have been aimed at a relatively small and technical audience. The authors of Understanding Public-Key Infrastructure have written the first comprehensive book about PKI that is accessible to the layperson.

The book is written in a clear and straightforward manner that helps the novice reader grasp the concepts and issues that the authors discuss. The text reads a little drily in places, but those rough spots are few and far between.

At its core Understanding Public-Key Infrastructure is a tutorial on PKI. Rather than focus on the minutiae of cryptographic algorithms and other highly technical areas of inquiry, Adams and Lloyd take the broader view.

They realize that the average decision-maker who is responsible for deciding which security solutions are deployed in an organization may not have the background or knowledge to adequately assess what type of solution his company may need.

In practice, this assumption results in a book that introduces a topic, discusses it in some detail, then points the reader to other sources of information to learn about the fine points of a particular area of interest.

The book is fully referenced for further reading on every topic discussed. The references span the range of technical papers and draft standards proposals to plain-language business analysts reports and Web links.

The book also has value for security industry insiders as a comprehensive reference, keeping in mind that PKI is an advancing field.

Surveying the nascent PKI field, the authors present a wide number of concepts, including a basic introduction to public key cryptography, discussion of the core PKI services of authentication, data integrity, and confidentiality, as well as PKI-enabled services. The pair go on to introduce the ideas behind various trust models, certification, and interoperability issues, among others.

Adams and Lloyd are, respectively, a senior cryptographer and senior security consultant at Entrust Technologies, a major PKI vendor. The reader will appreciate that the pair seem to have taken great pains to present a vendor-neutral overview of PKI instead of advocating Entrust's approach over others.

Adams' activities in the standards area, as well as his position as manager of Entrust Technologies' standards program, allow him to convincingly discuss standardization efforts and explain the role that standards play in PKI.

While the pair could have stopped writing once the technical tutorials were complete, they have gone a step further. The authors have addressed the business drivers for PKI and the legal issues that surround it. They also write about considerations necessary for any business case including business models, disaster planning, physical security and opeational tradeoffs when choosing one deployment approach over another.

 LINKS

Chapters & Excerpts from Understanding Public-Key Infrastructure (@ Cisco Knowledge Suite)

• Table of Contents
• Chapter 2 tutorial: An Introduction to Public-Key Cryptography
  
• Chapter 3 tutorial: PKI: The Concepts of an Infrastructure
  
• Chapter 4: Core PKI Services: Authentication, Integrity and Confidentiality
  
• Chapter 5: PKI-Enabled Services
  
• Chapter 7: Key and Certificate Management
  
• Chapter 23 tutorial: Benefits and Costs of a PKI

Other

• Entrust Technologies
• Buy this book

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