X.509 PKI and Open PGP’s PKI IT & Computer Science Essay (Essay Sample)

X.509 PKI and Open PGP’s PKI
In cryptography, X.509 is an ITU-T standard for establishment of a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) and Privilege Management Infrastructure (PMI). It includes many standard formats like public key certificates, attribute certificates, certificate path validation algorithms etc. Open PGP’s PKI, which is claimed to be better than X.509, is a set of hardware, software, personnel, policies and procedures that may be required to create, manage, distribute, use, store and revoke digital certificates by a means of certificate authority (CA).
The features of X.509 and PGP’s PKI can be separated in many areas like the format of certificates followed by the two standards, user identification, key management services, usability and more. Every PGP certificate is composed of a self-signature and carries a possibility of having multiple signatures. On the other hand, the X.509 certificates support only one digital signature which is used for the attestation of the validity of keys. Only one name for the owner of the key is supported by X.509 whereas PGP has many several keys with many labels that identify the user in multiple possible ways.