Web (browser) PKI Standards - A study

Dear all,

I have on behalf of a client, taken the liberty to investigate
the state of client-side PKI support in web-browsers with
respect to standards and interoperability.  There were several
reasons for performing this study, and a major such was that we
have found that none of the pretty large Nordic e-government
initiatives and on-line banks, actually use the browsers' built-in
client-side PKI mechanisms at all, most of them rather rely on
Java applets developed by various ISVs.  The reason for this
is very obvious:

=============================================
   Practically every piece of client-side Web-PKI, ranging
   from on-line certification support to on-line (web-form)
   signing, is currently entirely vendor-dependent
=============================================

Assuming that there will be billions of users of Web-PKI
in a few years from now (here adding the crowd likely to use
"The Mobile Internet"), it seems that there could be a major
task ahead for the W3C.

There is a lot more to say on this subject but this could
hopefully serve as a starter for discussions.

Regards
Anders Rundgren
Independent Consultant, PKI and e-business
+ 46 70 627 74 37 (on CET)

Received on Saturday, 1 November 2003 14:26:05 UTC