Options analysis of the Canadian forces public key infrastructure

A public key infrastructure (PKI) provides security services such as confidentiality, authentication, and nonrepudiation for communications protocols. SSL, IPsec and S/MIME use certificates provided by a PKI for real-time secure messaging, the essential service for electronic transactions. While it is a relatively straight-forward exercise to build a PKI on a LAN, this paper examines the issues associated with the more complicated PKI deployment on the Canadian forces' Defence Wide Area Network (DWAN).