My first exposure to [[public key infrastructure]] was while working in Richardson TX at Nortel. About 1996, the Entrust organization reported into my boss' boss. As sister organizations it was appropriate to check out how we could use their technology and discuss how they could use our technologies. As part of that discussion, I began to study PKI technology – Nortel had secured years before a license to the RSA patents, and were attempting to commercialize the algorithm within an environment of message and file encryption and other services.

The big services of PKI were privacy via encryption, non-repudiation – evidence that only you could have sent the message, authorization – only folks with the appropriate credentials could have access to the engine, integrity – in that there were solid methods for assuring that the message received was the message sent and authentication – validating that only the authentic sender and addressees would be able to read the message.  At the time there was a plugin for Microsoft Outlook so that a message could be secured or checked from within the email application. It also had a standalone application that could bulk encrypt files and folders for storage or transport.