Public Key Infrastructure – Technology or Hype?

Scott writes “PKI has been getting a lot of bad press of late, but is it justified? Has the technology failed or is it a problem of implementation? First it is important to distinguish between public key cryptography (as discovered by Rivest, Shamir and Adelman, or Clifford Cocks) and PKI or public key infrastructure. Let me hasten to state that public key cryptography works splendidly well, nothing whatever is wrong with it, and until quantum computing arrives to upset many of our current theories (see Singh, The Code Book: 1999), nothing will be wrong with it.”