Re: PKI Disaster Recovery and Key Rollover

[pgut001@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Peter Gutmann)]

"Denis Pinkas" <denis.pinkas@xxxxxxxx> writes:

>This document presents a framework to assist the writers of policy or
>practice statements and the designers of a Public Key Infrastructure to
>prepare disaster recovery plans in case of a private key-compromise or a
>private key-loss. This may happen to end-entity keys, Certification
>Authorities, Revocation Authorities, Attribute Authorities, or Time-Stamping
>Authorities.  Since certificates have finite validity, CA key-rollover should
>be planned in advance.

Should it also cover the far more serious problem of the CA going out of
business?  I've talked to users of a number of CAs that have failed and the
effect has been pretty chaotic on relying parties and users: one day the CA
just isn't there any more, and everything stops working.  This seems to be by
far the most serious real-world-impact CA issue that I've encountered, but
it's not even considered in any PKI documentation that I know of.

Peter.