Remind me why I need a public key. Dick Hardt, founder and now CTO of ActiveState, was prowling around the digital ID conference asking a deceptively simple question: "Why do I need a key pair?" ...
Now Dick draws a distinction between my key, issued to me, managed in my certificate database by my software on my device, and a key that lives on a device (phone, PDA, computer) to which I can authenticate.[Jon's Radio]