Development of a public key infrastructure across multiple enterprises

Main-stream applications are beginning to incorporate public key cryptography. It can be difficult to deploy this technology without a robust infrastructure to support it. It can also be difficult to deploy a public key infrastructure among multiple enterprises when different applications and standards must be supported. This discussion chronicles the efforts by a team within the US Department of Energy's Nuclear Weapons Complex to build a public key infrastructure and deploy applications that use it. The emphasis of this paper is on the lessons learned during this effort and an assessment of the overall impact of this technology.