The Marine Corps' Marine Forces Pacific is scheduled to transition to a new public-key infrastructure early next year, but it found that the process has been more difficult than anticipated.

Downloading the personal certificates from a certificate authority on the mainland has proven to be a time-consuming and frustrating process, which has lead the command to request a certificate authority be placed in the Pacific region.

Col. Mark Clapp of Marine Forces Pacific said all of the command's private Web servers have been issued PKI server certificates, and more than 600 end-user certificates have been generated from the certificate authority in Chambersburg, Pa.

But only 429 of those personal certificates, which represent about half of the Marine Forces Pacific staff, have been successfully downloaded, and integration with the Defense Department's Common Access Cards (CAC) looms next year, Clapp said.

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