Simplifying public key management

The various approaches to public key management for ease of use, transparency and security are discussed. The secure sockets layer (SSL) protocol's key management mechanism was designed to address the MITM attacks. The secure shell (SSH) protocol is another approach to key generation and continuity management that lets a user to verify a key through a universal key identifier. Another approach is StartTLS, which is an extension to the simple mail transfer protocol (SMTP) that provides opportunistic TLS-based encryption for mail transfers.