How to Design a Public Key Infrastructure for a Central Bank Digital Currency

Makan Rafiee, Lars Hupel

2025

Abstract

Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) is a new form of money, issued by a country’s or region’s central bank, that can be used for a variety of payment scenarios. Depending on its concrete implementation, there are many participants in a production CBDC ecosystem, including the central bank, commercial banks, merchants, individuals, and wallet providers. There is a need for robust and scalable Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) for CBDC to ensure the continued trust of all entities in the system. This paper discusses the criteria that should flow into the design of a PKI and proposes a certificate hierarchy, together with a rollover concept ensuring continuous operation of the system. We further consider several peculiarities, such as the circulation of offline-capable hardware wallets.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Rafiee M. and Hupel L. (2025). How to Design a Public Key Infrastructure for a Central Bank Digital Currency. In Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Security and Cryptography - Volume 1: SECRYPT; ISBN 978-989-758-760-3, SciTePress, pages 696-704. DOI: 10.5220/0013562300003979

in Bibtex Style

@conference{secrypt25,
author={Makan Rafiee and Lars Hupel},
title={How to Design a Public Key Infrastructure for a Central Bank Digital Currency},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Security and Cryptography - Volume 1: SECRYPT},
year={2025},
pages={696-704},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0013562300003979},
isbn={978-989-758-760-3},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Security and Cryptography - Volume 1: SECRYPT
TI - How to Design a Public Key Infrastructure for a Central Bank Digital Currency
SN - 978-989-758-760-3
AU - Rafiee M.
AU - Hupel L.
PY - 2025
SP - 696
EP - 704
DO - 10.5220/0013562300003979
PB - SciTePress