Abstract Public key cryptography was heralded as the means whereby parties could deal confidently with one another using electronic means. Many security risks are involved, and addressing them has proven to be much more challenging than was originally anticipated. It was drawn to attention some years ago how highly privacy-intrusive a PKI would be. Despite these warnings being repeated many times, and explained in increasing degrees of detail, PKI designers are still showing lamentably poor understanding of the issues involved. Because very little has been done to overcome the privacy-threatening nature of PKI, there is an increasing likelihood that public key cryptography will fail to become generally applied for the purposes of authentication.
Substantial investments are at serious risk of delivering little or no return.
PKI and Privacy 3. Related Privacy Threats 4. Conclusions References 1. Public key cryptography suffers disadvantages compared with conventional secret key cryptography. This is because it involves a considerably longer key, and hence encryption and decryption require much more processing power, or, for a given processor, significantly more processing time.