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PKI Gets Shot In The Arm From HSPD-12 |
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Source: Government Computer News - Posted by Eric Lubow
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In 1995, when Tim Polk began working full time on developing standards and guidance for using public-key infrastructure applications, he figured it would be a two- or three-year project. But 11 years later, Polk, the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s PKI program manager, still is helping agencies adopt the technology. “There has never been a killer app for PKI,” Polk said recently at a conference sponsored by Input Inc. of Reston, Va. “We spent a lot of time looking for it, but there was nothing so compelling that made agencies buy and install PKI to support one app.” While that killer app still may never come, Polk said Homeland Security Presidential Directive-12 should provide the impetus for every agency to use PKI more widely.
“We needed a centralized driver because it was hard to compute return on investment,” Polk said. “HSPD-12 and [Federal Information Processing Standard] 201 change everything. It is not the killer app we have been looking for ... [but] a lot of pieces of the interoperability puzzle have been solved.” Polk added that, because PKI is a central piece of FIPS-201, agencies and industry now have standards around which they can develop and implement software. FIPS-201 standardized biometrics, and the key size and algorithm it will support. “It used to be that, when you wanted to cross this divide, you had all these questions out there,” Polk said. “Now the hardest ones are resolved.” But Polk isn’t unrealistic about how quickly agencies will adopt applications such as e-mail or single-sign-on capability using PKI.
Read this full article at Government Computer News
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