Usability challenges of PKI

Introduction Contrary to analysts’ forecasts we heard some years ago, PKI (public key infrastructure) has not become a widespread technology yet. An important reason for this is the insufficient usability PKI-enabled applications are often blamed for [11]. Users’ behavior has turned out to be the biggest risk in security software [10], so usability issues deserve closer attention. Research in the field of usability of security applications has so far focused on the usage of passwords since they are a common security mechanism (see e.g. [6,8] for a survey). The growing importance of PKI requires further efforts since there are peculiarities calling for special treatment.