Introduction to Cryptography
Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) is a system used to manage digital certificates and public-private key pairs. PKI is used to establish trust between parties who are communicating over an insecure network, such as the internet. PKI is used in a variety of applications, such as secure email, e-commerce, and electronic voting systems.
The purpose of PKI is to provide a secure way of exchanging data, while ensuring that the identity of the parties involved is verified. PKI ensures this by using digital certificates, which are issued by a trusted third party, known as a Certificate Authority (CA).
A digital certificate is an electronic document that contains information about the identity of the certificate holder, as well as the public key that is associated with the private key held by the certificate holder. The digital certificate is signed by the CA, which ensures that the certificate holder's identity has been verified. When two parties communicate, they use their public and private key pairs to encrypt and decrypt messages. The public key is freely available, while the private key is kept secret.
PKI is based on a hierarchical trust model, where a root CA is at the top of the hierarchy, and issues certificates to intermediate CAs, which in turn issue certificates to end users. This ensures that trust can be established throughout the hierarchy, and that the identity of certificate holders can be verified.
PKI is a complex system, and there are many technical details that must be considered when implementing it. However, PKI is a critical component of modern secure communication systems, and is widely used in a variety of applications.
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