Further Reading

A good, one-stop resource for PKI is Planning for PKI by Russ Housley and Tim Polk, published by Wiley Computer Publishing. It has detailed coverage of structure and semantics of X.509 certificates, CRLs, and other PKI-related digital documents. It also covers different PKI architectures, PKI management protocols and algorithms for building and validating certification paths. An interesting aspect of this book is the coverage of real PKI deployments: Defense Management System 1.0, a PKI deployment for the U.S. Military; PKI deployment by California Independent Service Operator for electricity trading and auctions; and the federal bridge CA project.

IETF RFC2459 is the authoritative source for X.509 certificate and CRL profiles and contains the ASN.1 notation and definition of different object identifiers used in these profiles. RFCs 2495, 2510, 2511 and 2527 contain specifications for most of the PKI-related IETF standards. A complete listing of PKI related IETF standards and information on work in progress can be found at Public-Key Infrastructure (X.509) or PKIX working group home page at http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/pkix-charter.html.

Java API for certification path construction and validation is described in J2SE SDK documentation.