PKI Uncovered Book Review

I have recently had the chance to read the new Cisco Press book PKI Uncovered: Certificate-Based Security Solutions for Next-Generation Networks  by Andrew Karamanian, Srinivas Tenneti, and Francois Dessart.  I will admit that Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) has been something of a double sided sword for me for some time.  I know that PKI is important for securing network resources, but I have also had the belief that certificate based security was a royal pain to implement.


This book took me through the basics of PKI in a manner that made a lot of concepts seem less complicated than I had made them out to be.  The step by step explanations of setting up PKI in a Cisco IOS world were well designed and presented.  Later on in the book the authors proceeded into more complex real world examples of VPNs and 802.1x scenarios based on the building blocks from the beginning of the book.  I am definitely going to keep this book on my quick reference shelf as I move forward with 802.1x and WPA2-Enterprise in my network.