Analysis and design of certificate life cycle mechanisms for IPv6 based public key cryptosystem

Security, has become a primary focus, througout the entire information technology industry. With the massive advent of the internet enabled businesses, it has become critical for todays companies to ensure security concerns, along with the market pressure, to be present on the World Wide Web. For this purpose, several methods are widely deployed today such as the data encryption or password based authentication for conforming secure data transmissions. Nevertheless, accompanied by the emerging weaknesses of these types of developments, the necessity of designing security in a higher level prospect has come out. In essence, security related access control, data confidentiality, data integrity, key management, authentication, non-repudation or availability issues are supported principally by public key infrastructure in a conceptual manner. In conjunction with the protocols, services and standards, public key infrastructure adresses these topics by methods of public key cryptography and digital signing instruments, allowing solid and secure framework for assembling other various applications or network security mechanisms. JAVA based PKI with IPv6 support called UMU-PKI is principally aiming to build a system model for integrating IPv6 based X.509 certification services within the public key infrastructure. The efforts on the public key infrastructure based on the new generation internet protocol called IPv6, which contains solutions for the basic drawbacks and problems of current IPv4 protocol, will play a critical role in constructing the solid and reliable future of internet. In this study, UMU-PKI v6 system infrastructure and architecture concerns are examined in detail, certificate lifecycle management and certificate validation processes which should take a vital role in the core part of the whole system processes are deeply studied. CMC and SCVP protocols which are still in progress, are proposed to integrate to the system in order to provide concrete and secure mechanisms on both certificate lifecycle management and validation procedures. Along with this study, operational system integration models are designed with the application based integration schemes including the deep analysis of the two newly configured certificate based protocols. The security structure of the system has been improved via proposed solution. Keywords: IPv6, PKI, Public Key, Cryptography, UMU-PKI, Certificate Management, Certificate Validation, CMC, SCVP