Authenticity of public keys in asymmetric cryptosystems

Recently, the public key infrastructure has become increasingly important for cryptographic schemes. Little research has been done, however, on the design of public key infrastructures. Although the public key infrastructure can be solved using the current standard X.509, it has not proved to be efficient when the required security level is high. In this paper, we introduce a two-level public key infrastructure. It provides a more practical and competitive application than X.509. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V.