Despite enthusiastic predictions in the trade press, an X.509-style PKI has so far failed to eventuate to any significant degree. This paper looks at some of the reasons behind this, examining why a pure X.509-style PKI may never appear outside a few closed, highly-controlled environments such as government agencies. On the other hand there are many instances in which situation-and application-specific uses of certificates can be employed in a manner which avoids the shortcomings of X.509's one-size-(mis)fits-all approach. The paper examines a number of these situation-specific approaches to working with certificates, and concludes with a collection of useful design rules to consider before embarking on a PKI project.

We spent the 1990s building and deploying security that wasn't really needed, and now that it's actually desirable, we're finding that nobody can use it.

This document describes a means of negotiating the use of the encrypt-then-MAC security mechanism in place of the existing MACthen-encrypt mechanism in Transport Layer Security (TLS) and Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS). The MAC-then-encrypt mechanism has been the subject of a number of security vulnerabilities over a period of many years.

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