Development of an intranet security infrastructure and its application

As the support for X.509 digital certificate standardized in most Web browsers and servers, public-key cryptography is emerging as the security solution for both Internet and intranet applications. The paper describes the security infrastructure and solutions implemented for supporting AT&T long-distance network maintenance. This public-key infrastructure implements the short-lived certificate framework to reduce the cost associated with public-key management. The infrastructure supports a certification group concept that allows individual operation units within an organization to tailor their certification policies. This solution minimizes the changes needed for migrating existing applications to the SSI authentication framework.