PKI and Federated Identity Management introductory documents

One of Carillon's strengths is its experts' skill at communicating technical concepts in a clear, concise way to both technical and non-technical audiences. These aptitudes are put to use in this section, where you will find various documents introducing the reader to concepts found in Public Key Infrastructure and Identity Federation solutions.

Readers interested in more in-depth information will want to look at our HOWTOs, whitepapers and articles section.

These two pages present a basic explanation of what a Public Key Infrastructure and Federated Identity Management are.

• What is a Public Key Infrastructure?
• What is Federated Identity Management?

Carillon has prepared these lighthearted tutorials describing various PKI-related concepts. Since Identity Management offers few occasions for comic relief, we traded serious for simple, and let the fingerpuppets do the talking.

Enrolment, sometimes also called the Registration Authority process, is the first step to participating in a PKI.

• Basic PKI enrolment process (PDF)
• Low assurance PKI enrolment over the web (PDF)
• Higher assurance PKI enrolment with a smartcard (PDF)
• PKI enrolment for devices (PDF)

And here are some of the day-to-day concepts found in a PKI:

• Encryption vs. Signature (PDF)
• Path Validation, or the Chain of Trust (PDF)
• Non-Repudiation (PDF)
• Gauging Assurance (PDF)
• Certificate Revocation (PDF)
• Certificate Management Lifecycle (PDF)
• Secure Web Applications (PDF)

Here are some documents providing use-cases, instructions, and factors to consider, related to some of our software products.

• When deploying a PKI-based Secure Email solution, it is necessary to provide Certificate Discovery infrastructure, such as the Carillon LDAP Proxy, so that a sender can find a target recipient's certificate in order to encrypt and send the mail. This document describes architecture decisions related to implementing such a system.
  • Certificate Discovery Scenarios (PDF)
• Pathfinder is our Path Validation and Discovery (PDVal) tool for verification of X.509 certificates. This document describes how to set up and use Pathfinder.
  • Pathfinder Care and Feeding (PDF)