Evaluating web PKIs

Certificate authorities serve as trusted parties to help secure web communications. They are a vital component for ensuring the security of cloud infrastructures and big data repositories. Unfortunately, recent attacks using mis-issued certificates show this model is severely broken. Much research has been done to enhance certificate management in order to create more secure and reliable cloud architectures. However, none of it has been widely adopted yet, and it is hard to judge which one is the winner. This chapter provides a survey with critical analysis on the existing proposals for managing public key certificates. This evaluation framework would be helpful for future research on designing an alternative certificate management system to secure the internet.