A proposal for collaborative internet-scale trust infrastructures deployment: the public key system (PKS)

Public Key technology is about multiple parties across different domains making assertions that can be chained together to make trust judgments. Today, the need for more interoperable and usable trust infrastructures is urgent in order to fulfill the security needs of computer and mobile devices. Developing, deploying, and maintaining information technology that provides effective and usable solutions has yet to be achieved. In this paper, we propose a new framework for a distributed support system for trust infrastructure deployment: the Public Key System (PKS). We describe the general architecture based on Distributed Hash Tables (DHTs), how it simplifies the deployment and usability of federated identities, and how existing infrastructures can be integrated into our system. This paper lays down the basis for the deployment of collaborative Internet-scale trust infrastructures.