Public Key Infrastructure: An Enhanced Validation Framework

Abstract

Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) is a comprehensive information security framework for providing secure information and communication over the internet. Its need and use has grown over the years and continually grows. This research work examines the current PKI framework’s validation process as operated by vendors and subscribers to identify the drawbacks and propose enhanced approaches to its validation mechanism. Using an approach of reviewing secondary data, critical weaknesses of integrity, proof of trust and single point-of-failure were identified with the current PKI framework. This study therefore advances proposed solutions to address the identified weaknesses by specifically introducing multiple Certificate Authorities, storage, visibility and searchability of subscriber information in public repository. A comprehensive detail of its implementation is proposed to address the identified weaknesses of uncertain integrity, trust for certificate authorities and prevent a single point of failure. Furthermore, the proposed enhancements are validated with the protection motivation theory and a framework for empirically testing the enhancements is suggested. Further research would be required to factor in multi-factor authentication without compromising performance.