Many examples can be described that are essential to expanding the academic mission of higher educational institutions. There are also many research questions that will need to be explored in the efforts to provide these services in a ubiquitous and transparent manner, so that PKI will be as widely available and easy to use as network ports are today. Next-generation applications need a flexible way to decide access control based on many complex attributes, in distributed populations and organizations. Because of its ability to securely express information in such communities, public key cryptography is the perfect building block. Realizing this vision requires identifying and solving trust and usability shortcomings in client, server, and application tools.
Academia provides a large set of real problems to drive and test our research work.
One key issue is enabling and enforcing license agreements applicable to students enrolled in particular courses. For licensees use of PKI is a way to minimize the cost of the license by providing access to only the limited number of specific students who need it. For licensors it provides more secure control over access, without having to enroll each individual user of the service. New standards for this sort of interchange may provide more opportunities to share locally developed materials between higher educational institutions. Materials developed by one institution can be electronically delivered conveniently from their servers to individuals or groups at some other institution who are participating in a specific activity.