SACS ´07

Landrock Peter

30 years of PKI - from excitement through exhaustion to useful deployment

After much scrutiny by the scientific community, PKI really started taking off in the early to mid 90'es, only to create despair and disillusion in a number of deployments, not least because of the over-emphasis on the X.509 architecture, the legal aspects and the army of consultants with no practical experience responsible for the tenders. Legislation in Europe on digital signatures was premature and even pretended to rest on a more general principle than public key. Surviving solutions in Electronic Commerce and e-Government are still quite pedestrian and limited, although more advanced solutions start to emerge, e.g. in Austria, Luxemburg and some Scandinavian countries. But other grand-scale viable solutions emerged, too, and common to them all is that certificates and signatures are verified by devices and not humans, and this continues to be where the strength of PKI is tested and verified: In EMV for debit- and creditcards, in TPM (Trusted Platform Modules) and in e-Passports solutions, and we begin to appreciate the advantage of elliptic curves over e.g. RSA, as signature generation is much faster.

About Peter Landrock

Prof. Dr. Peter Landrock holds the majority of shares in Cryptomathic which he founded with two fellow cryptographers in 1986 as a university spin-off from the University of Aarhus, Denmark. The company was one of the first in the world to commercialise cryptographic algorithms, and Peter Landrock continuously aims at keeping Cryptomathic at the cutting edge of technology to the benefit of the company’s customers and business partners.

Peter Landrock obtained his Ph.D. in mathematics in 1974 from the University of Chicago and started working with data security in 1984. He served as President of the International Association for Cryptologic Research from 1992 to 1995, and has been on the Board of Directors since then. At the University of Aarhus he has built one of the leading research teams in Data Security in Europe. He has been visiting professor at a number of universities, incl. IAS Princeton, Cambridge, and Leuven.
In 1997 Peter Landrock was asked to serve on the technical advisory board of the new Microsoft Research Lab at Cambridge University, UK. He also holds an honourable professorship at the University of Aarhus and has been a member of the Danish IT Security Council as an advisor to the Danish Government for the last seven years.