Public Key Security
Internal
Overview
Public Key Infrastructure (PKI)
A public key infrastructure (PKI) is a set of roles, policies and procedures needed to create, manage, distribute, use, store, and revoke digital certificates and manage public-key encryption. The components of the architecture are aimed at binding public keys with respective identities of entities owning those public keys, such as people or organizations. The binding is established through a process of registration and issuance of certificates at and by a certificate authority (CA).
Certificate Authority (CA)
Certificate
Key Pair
Public Key
Private Key
X.509
SSL/TLS
Transport Layer Security (TLS) is the successor of Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). They are both cryptographic protocols designed to provide communications security over a computer network. The client/server pair use a symmetric key to encrypt the communication. The symmetric key is unique and generated for each connection, as part of a protocol exchange that involves pair's public and private keys. For more details, see: