Charter of the working group that develops Internet standards needed to support an X.509-based PKI. (pkix)

This document provides an overview or 'roadmap' of the work done by the IETF PKIX working group. It describes some of the terminology used in the working group's documents, and the theory behind an X.509-based PKI.

The document presents a framework to assist the writers of certificate policies or certification practice statements forcertification authorities and public key infrastructures.

The PKIX specification profiles the format and semantics of fields in X.509 V3 certificates containing Key Exchange Algorithm (KEA) keys, a classified algorithm for exchanging keys.