The head of the federal government's public-key infrastructure initiative said the benefits of PKI far outweigh difficulties in implementation, and that now is the time for government agencies as well as enterprises to begin plans for deployment. In his keynote address today at the Electronic Messaging Association's Fall '99 Solutions Summit, Richard Guida, chairman of the federal PKI steering committee, called PKI the best method for meeting the government's high security needs. He outlined the government's plan to deploy PKI in several agencies including the Department of Defense, and to use the technology to let the public securely interact with government over e-mail and the Internet. You may also need varying levels of authentication, and you need the ability for nonrepudiation.
Public key does that.
There's no technology yet that will guarantee nonrepudiation, but public-key infrastructure comes closest to it. Guida said the biggest hurdle in PKI deployment is the synchronization of directories, which he said usually accounts for more than half the budget of PKI projects. He advised companies to rethink the common belief that they must solve directory compatibility problems before undertaking PKI planning. Solutions to directory problems will be pushed by use of PKI, rather than the other way around. If I waited for directory harmony before I started working on PKI, my kids would be the ones working on it.