Securing The Electronic Market: The KEYSTONE Public Key Infrastructure Architecture

In this paper, the unified, abstract KEYSTONE Public Key Infrastructure is presented. This architecture consists of a reference model, a functional architecture specification, and a set of technologies that can be used for implementing the functional units, along with all relevant standards. It was derived within the course of the KEYSTONE project, which was funded by the European Commission under the Electronic Trust Services II Programme. The proposed PKI architecture guarantees openness, scalability, flexibility, extensibility, integration with existing TTP and information infrastructure, transparency and, above all, security. Thus, it enjoys all the desirable characteristics and fulfils all those criteria that are essential for a PKI to constitute a successful framework for the development of inter-domain and international Trusted Services.