Information Security

Advances and Remaining Challenges to Adoption of Public Key Infrastructure Technology Gao ID: GAO-01-277 February 26, 2001

The federal government must overcome several major challenges before public key infrastructure (PKI) technology can be widely and effectively used. These challenges include providing interoperability among agency PKIs, ensuring that PKI implementations can support a potential large scale of users, reducing the cost of building PKI systems, setting policies to maintain trust levels among agencies, and establishing training programs for users at all levels. Although such challenges are difficult to overcome in the near term, the federal government can take steps to better assist agencies develop and implement PKIs that may eventually be interconnected into a federal governmentwide system. The recent effort to develop a Federal Bridge Certification Authority (FBCA) is an excellent first step in this direction, but this effort lacks the context of a well-defined program plan for the government as well as key policy and technical standards. Establishing a federal PKI management framework could facilitate and accelerate participation in the FBCA as well as overall federal adoption of key technology for enabling electronic government.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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