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Tuesday April 19th – Public Key Infrastructure (PKI)

To provide your own take on the PKI Session, please either comment below or send your notes and/or multimedia to dnlcornwall@alaska.net. Please let FGI know if we can use your name and affiliation.


The following notes were contributed by Sharon M. Partridge of the Jefferson County Public Library in Lakewood CO. Any hyperlinks were added by FGI staff.

All interpretations of documents and comments made are my own and do not reflect on my institution. These were typed on the day noted and subsequent days may have changed things. All mistakes are mine and feel free to post corrections.

PKI software shows a pop-up of Adobe and then a company called En Trust. Each time a document is pulled, En Trust checks the signature and makes sure that it is still a valid signatory. GPO can create their own logo and the language to explain what it is that they are validating (something like “This is an official government document and is certified by the Superintendent of Documents of the Government Printing Office.” This language shows in a browse table under properties for the document. (Some details in this report may be unreliable because we were getting this info very quickly). En Trust is free and does need to be loaded on computers as Adobe Reader is. It actually plugs into Adobe but you will still be able to see the document without the software. It just won’t show the seal of authenticity. There is a small blue seal in the top left corner of the document itself. This will also show a seal from GPO but the design hasn’t been finalized. It may also include a seal from the agency. These seals show when the document is printed. There will be a small question mark in the corner if the plug in hasn’t been loaded but that will be the only change the public would see. There is a red X in the corner if the content has been changed or if the file has transmission trouble. You can reload the document and see if that fixes it. If it doesn’t, you can click on a button that says “view signed version” and this allows you to compare both to see the changes that have been made. The law libraries pointed out that this wouldn’t be acceptable in court but GPO says this is a first step and they will begin showing it at legal conferences.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.


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