Certificates provide an attractive business model.
If you can convince someone to purchase a private CA and pay you afee for every certificate he issues, you're also in good shape. With that much money at stake, it is also no wonder that almost all the literature and lobbying on the subject is produced by PKI vendors. In this essay, we hope to explore some of those questions. The security of any CA-based system is based on many links and they're not all cryptographic. People are involved.