PKIaaS – Vivacity Technologies Ltd.

Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) is a collection of hardware, software, procedures, roles, and policies that enables the use of public key encryption schemes within the context of information and communication technology (ICT) systems. In public key encryption schemes, an entity (which can be a person, a machine, or anything in between) generates two mathematically related keys: one private key, which is kept secret at all times, and one public key, which anyone may access. PKIs are responsible for the safekeeping, availability, and authenticity of public keys to enable trust between enrolled PKI stakeholders.

The focus of this project will be to implement and deploy a PKI service to support the widespread adoption of public key encryption systems even in hardware-constrained environments (such as embedded systems and Internet of Things (IoT) environments. This will be done by leveraging elliptic curve encryption algorithms, which provide a high level of security with reduced key sizes, and the use of M2M certificate formats, which provide an average 40% reduction in size when compared to general-purpose certificate standards, such as X.509. Such reductions in key and certificate sizes significantly improve the performance of cybersecurity-related tasks in individual network nodes. Such individual improvements are compounded as the number of interconnected network nodes increases, which promotes dramatic efficiencies in systems with a large number of networked components.

Faculty Supervisor:

Musfiq Rahman

Student:

Partner:

Vivacity Technologies Ltd

Discipline:

Computer science

Sector:

Professional, scientific and technical services

University:

Thompson Rivers University

Program: