For most people in the IT sector, technical terms are a given. These terms, like API, BCP, and cos PKI, which stands for Public Key Infrastructure, make up the daily vocabulary. However, upon careful consideration, you may realize that not everyone understands these terms on a fundamental level.
Even those who work with computers every day may not truly understand the full concept of public key infrastructure. Let alone the newbies. If you’ve ever wondered what the role of PKI is or why it’s so important in today’s IT sector, this post is for you.
Today’s post explains PKIs in layman’s terms with the assumption that you don’t have any previous knowledge of the topic.
So, let’s start from the top.
What Exactly is a Public Key Infrastructure?
As you might have guessed by now, PKI stands for Public Key Infrastructure. It’s a technical component derived from a mechanism known as a digital certificate. The primary use of this component is to sign or/and encrypt data.
Encrypting data simply means scrambling a piece of digital information to prevent unauthorized access. On the other hand, data signing is the process of authenticating data. You don’t have to look far to find an excellent example of data signing because almost everyone knows about signing in e-mail messages.
Likewise, computer drivers and software come with the manufacturer’s digital signature to prove it came from the expected source.
How PKI Works
The easiest way to understand how PKIs work is to relate them to the real world. Digital certificates and signatures are similar to employee IDs, passports, and driver’s licenses.
However, there’s one key distinguishing element!
Apart from human beings (in the real world), anything that requires proving its identity can receive a digital certificate. This means your computer, mouse, software, update, etc.
In short, PKIs provide the policies and technologies to help build and use digital certificates, which certificate authorities (CAs) can validate with different models.
Way PKI Protects Information
PKI helps safeguard your information in several ways, such as:
- Privacy assurance
- Identify authentication
- Non-repudiation support
- Integrity verification
- Transaction authorization
- Access authorization
A typical example of PKI security used by several IT infrastructures is SSL certificates.
Now, let’s take a closer look at some of the new terms introduced above, like CAs.
Introducing Certificate Authorities
Certificate authorities are charged with creating digital certificates. They control every aspect of the policies, procedures, and practices for assessing and issuing certificates to recipients.
If you magnify their responsibility, you’ll find the operators and owners of a CA determine the following:
- Types of issued certificates
- Operations and security protocols
- Vetting techniques for certificate recipients
- Parameters the certificate contains
With these parameters put in place by the CAs, they formally document each policy. Now, it lies with the users of each certificate to choose the level of trust to delegate to the various certificates from a specific CA.
How the Certificate Process Works Out
The certificate-issuing process depends primarily on asymmetric encryption and takes the following form:
- A private key is generated, followed by the computation of the corresponding public key.
- The CA demands the relevant identifying attributes from the private key owner and checks the information.
- A Certificate Signing Request (CSR) helps encode the public key and the identifying attributes.
- The key owner signs the CSR as proof of ownership.
- The issuing CA verifies the request and signs the certificate with its private key.
Any entity can verify the real issuing CA of a certificate by using the public portion of the same certificate. You only need to confirm the owner of the private key used to sign the certificate. Furthermore, once you establish that the CA is trustworthy, you can rest assured that data transferred to the certificate holder will reach the intended recipient.
Why PKI Plays Such a Vital Role in Today’s Digital Era?
The answer is relatively simple!
PKI is an essential component of today’s digital age because of the millions of applications and devices with constant access to the internet. Each of these entities requires certification to operate safely.
Therefore, properly maintaining and authenticating certificates for these technologies is vital to ensuring this giant web of interconnected devices and software remains secure.
To better appreciate PKIs’ role in today’s world, it’s worth taking the trouble to briefly cover the previous waves of PKI.
- First wave (1995 to 2002): The earliest use of PKI involved issuing certificates to eCommerce websites.
- Second wave (2003 to 2010): This introduced PKIs at the enterprise level in the early 2000s. Companies could issue in-house certificates and facilities like internal web servers.
- Third wave (2011 to present day): We’re still in this wave of PKI, which currently involves the Internet of Things (IoT) and millions of certificates. This gives rise to PKI scaling and management challenges.
Final Words
By now, you should have a clearer picture of the PKI’s general role in the grand scheme of things. Overall, the current digital world is a much safer place thanks to PKIs. With cyber threats lurking, we hope this post answered the basics.
