Attended Burton (now acquired by Gartner) Catalyst 2010 in San Diego, an excellent forum to get upto speed on what is happening in technology world in terms of standards and trends.

Paradigm shifts:
* Pushing core to the outside
* How SAAS, HIAS, PAAS, have provided capabilities to the industry in terms of scalability. Users pay only what they need. * Stop wasting platform resources by leveraging virtualization
* Chaning views on how Identities should be managed
* Writing applications that are cloud aware and are able to co-exist on a platform

Project Dogtag is an opensource version of Red Hat Certificate Server. It was released to public in late March, 2008, installs on Fedora8

From installation perspective a very straightforward install.

1. Installed Fedora8, default options
2. Followed instructions on http://pki.fedoraproject.org/wiki/PKI_Main_Page
3. I did not choose to compile, rather opted for compiled version
4. Installed the pre-requisites as the instructions on wiki said
5. Then proceeded with the instructions
6. Up and running in about 2 hours.

I would say try it out, and start using it.

Public-Key infrastructure (PKI) is the integration of software, hardware, encryption technologies and services for managing public keys. PKI provides for the four basic requirements of a secure system:

• Confidentiality to keep information private.
• Integrity to prove that information has not been changed.
• Authentication to prove the identity of the sender.
• Non-repudiation, which ensures that the information originator cannot deny ownership.

How these requirements are acheived?

Various PKI Implementations currently available

• •Red Hat Certificate Management System
• Project Dogtag (OpenSource version of Redhat, based on Fedora)