Considerations for Decision Makers and Developers Toward the Adoption of Decentralized Key Management Systems Technology in Emerging Applications

Public key infrastructure has been widely used in key management systems (KMSs). This article undertakes a comprehensive examination of the current decentralized KMS (DKMS) approaches with the objective of providing organizational decision makers and technical developers some guidance toward the adoption of DKMS technology in their respective applications.

The public key infrastructure (PKI) was introduced in the 1990s to make the management of certificates and encryption keys possible.1 However, the notion of centralization is a major aspect of traditional PKIs. Because of this interest in decentralized management, such approaches can be seen as early as 1996, with decentralized trust management2 and its proposed PolicyMaker system.