| Title | Exploring Potentials and Challenges of Blockchain-based Public Key Infrastructures |
| Publication Type | Conference Paper |
| Year of Publication | 2019 |
| Authors | Hepp, Thomas, Spaeh, Fabian, Schoenhals, Alexander, Ehret, Philip, Gipp, Bela |
| Conference Name | IEEE INFOCOM 2019 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications Workshops (INFOCOM WKSHPS) |
| Keywords | blockchain, blockchain development, blockchain technology, blockchain-based public key infrastructures, composability, fast consensus, independent blockchain-based solutions, independent solutions, pubcrawl, Public key, public key cryptography, public key infrastructure, Resiliency, Servers, smart contracts, traditional public key infrastructures, trustless immutable ledger, usability, usability issues, web of trust |
| Abstract | Traditional public key infrastructures (PKIs), in particular, X.509 and PGP, is plagued by security and usability issues. As reoccurring incidents show, these are not only of theoretical nature but allow attackers to inflict severe damage. Emerging blockchain technology allows for advances in this area, facilitating a trustless immutable ledger with fast consensus. There have been numerous proposals for utilization of the blockchain in the area of PKI, either as extensions upon existing methods or independent solutions. In this paper, we first study traditional PKI, then proceed with novel approaches, showing how they can improve upon recent issues. We provide a comprehensive evaluation, finding that independent blockchain-based solutions are preferable in the future, mainly due to their stronger security. However, global adoption of these yet requires advances in blockchain development, e.g., concerning scalability. |
| DOI | 10.1109/INFCOMW.2019.8845169 |
| Citation Key | hepp_exploring_2019 |
Exploring Potentials and Challenges of Blockchain-based Public Key Infrastructures