Sometimes, though, when organizations look more closely at deploying PKI, the technology loses its allure. Instead of finding a universal remedy, many agencies have become mired in the taxing policy and technical issues that come with PKI. Encryption techniques rely on randomly generated keys that must be mapped to user identities using digitally signed documents called certificates. Managing those certificates -- developing policies and processes to issue and revoke them efficiently -- is an enormously complex and expensive task that has hampered many agency efforts to build their own PKIs.
The infrastructure required to effectively deploy a PKI must include the processes involved in looking up certificates for encryption and maintaining certificate revocation lists for users who have left an agency or are otherwise no longer authorized to use the certificate.
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