Closing the PKIX Working Group is, apparently, not news.

PKI is perfect, isn’t it?

Thanks to https://unsplash.com/@iammrcup

The PKIX Working Group was of the digital certificates standards, among them X.509, that enable various applications such as secure email, web security (SSL/TLS), and digital signatures. It officially concluded its operations… more than ten years ago (31 October 2013) .. Coincidentally, more or less at the same time Bitcoin was created.

The closure can only mean that PKI is perfect (many beg to disagree), or that the companies that sponsor work in PKI have zero interest in evolving the technology as their interests are well served with the current one.

PKI, despite years of development and refinement still has challenges of around certificate management, trust hierarchies, and the susceptibility of certificate authorities to breaches and mismanagement. You can read more about it in the article below:

Rant: I would prefer to know less about PKI flaws but now is too late

In order to manage some of the flaws in PKI, the main players created a system called Certificate Transparency (CT), a framework and set of standards aimed at tackling the…