  The non-repudiation as an essential requirement of many applications can be
provided by the asymmetric key model. With the evolution of new applications
such as mobile commerce, it is essential to provide secure and efficient
solutions for the mobile environments. The traditional public key cryptography
involves huge computational costs and is not so suitable for the
resource-constrained platforms. The elliptic curve-based approaches as the
newer solutions require certain considerations that are not taken into account
in the traditional public key infrastructures. The main contribution of this
paper is to introduce a Lightweight Public Key Infrastructure (LPKI) for the
constrained platforms such as mobile phones. It takes advantages of elliptic
curve cryptography and signcryption to decrease the computational costs and
communication overheads, and adapting to the constraints. All the computational
costs of required validations can be eliminated from end-entities by
introduction of a validation authority to the introduced infrastructure and
delegating validations to such a component. LPKI is so suitable for mobile
environments and for applications such as mobile commerce where the security is
the great concern.
