PKI Consortium blog

Fortify Allows Users to Generate X.509 Certificates in Their Browser
June 19, 2018 by Tim Hollebeek Chrome Code Signing Encryption Firefox Google HSM Microsoft Mozilla S/MIME W3C
Fortify, an open source application sponsored by Certificate Authorities through the CA Security Council, is now available for Windows and Mac. The Fortify app, which is free for all users, connects a user’s web browsers to smart cards, security tokens, and certificates on a user’s local machine. This can allow users to generate X.509 certificates in their browser, replacing the need for the deprecated <keygen> functionality. Certificate Generation In The Browser The Web Cryptography API, also known as Web Crypto, provides a set of cryptographic capabilities for web browsers through a set of JavaScript APIs.

How Does the ROCA Attack Work?
November 9, 2017 by Tim Hollebeek Attack PKI ROCA RSA Web PKI
On October 17th, a group of Czech researchers announced they had found a way to factor the moduli of many RSA public keys generated by hardware produced by Infineon Technologies AG. The technical details were presented in a paper at the 2017 Computer and Communications Security conference, hosted by the Association for Computing Machinery on November 2nd. The technique only works against the key pairs produced by Infineon’s library, because it exploits the unique method they use to generate RSA primes.

Quantum Computing: Real or Exaggerated Threat to the Web PKI?
August 30, 2017 by Dean Coclin, Tim Hollebeek Encryption PKI Quantum RSA SSL/TLS Web PKI
Twenty years ago, paying your phone or electric bill involved receiving it in the mail, writing a check and mailing it back to the company. Today, that has largely been replaced by email and web-based payment submittals. All of this is secured by digital certificates and encryption, which provide privacy and authentication of information transiting the open Internet (aka Web PKI). The web PKI is predominantly secured by RSA encryption algorithms; mathematical theorems which have been improved over time.