With the ever-increasing growth in E-commerce and other internet applications, the need for secure transactions over the internet is also growing. In particular, more and more applications are demanding security services such as authentication, authorization, accounting, confidentiality, and non-repudiation. Since there is a cost associated with each type of service, the applications are demanding a wide variety of quality-of-service (QoS) provisions so they can pick and choose the services based on the value of their transactions. In this paper, we concentrate on one particular element of the end-to-end internet security: the public-key infrastructure (PKI). In particular, we identify the weaknesses of the current PKI systems in meeting the QoS needs and propose QPKI―a new QoS-based PKI architecture. The architecture includes the concepts of recertification and active certificates. The proposed architecture is shown to be much more flexible and cost-effective than the conventional PKI.
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