PKI eSigning Made Easy

Pki esigning

PKI is a two-key asymmetric cryptosystem it is a framework that allows different IT systems to have high level of information confidentiality through strong data encryption and high level of confidence through authentication with digital signatures and digital certificates let's say that Bob wants to send a secure message to Mary Mary has a key pair that consists of the public key and the private key these keys are statistically unique and mathematically related yet they are different from one another Bob requests married public key its public which means it can be distributed to anyone who wants to send an encrypted message to Mary it also means that the key is not a secret and therefore doesn't require any special protection so Mary sends it to Bob then Bob uses the public key that Mary sends him to encrypt a message and he sends the message back anything encrypted with the public key cannot be decrypted with the same key it has to be decrypted with the corresponding private key which is kept secret so Mary uses her private key to decrypt the message and read it this is great for confidentiality anyone who intercepted that message cannot decrypt the message because they don't have Mary's private key but how do we really know that Bob really got Mary's public someone could have pretended to be married and sent Bob her public key the solution seems incomplete this is where digital certificates come in digital certificates are data packages that identifies the entity in this case person that is associated with a public key the digital certificate itself is protected by asymmetric cryptography a trusted party known as a certificate authority or CA for short issues these digital certificates to the person once a certain confidence in the person's identity has been established by the CA PKI is also often backed up by legislation that is country specific you might find PKI mentioned in the digital signatures act electronic transactions Act or electronic commerce Act etc of your own country a CA is both an organization as well as a set of IT systems that is responsible for issuing revoking and distributing digital certificates it is often a third Hardy organization that is trusted by all parties participating in the PKI however organizations can also have their own in-house CA system secure metrics PKI in a box appliance allows organizations to do exactly that with ease and at a lower cost let's look at the bob mary scenario again but this time with PKI bob wants to send a secret message to mary mary has already obtained a digital certificate from a CA that Bob trusts Bob can now either get Mary certificate from the CA for Mary herself or from anybody else who has Mary's certificate since the digital certificate can be independently verified it doesn't really matter where Bob gets Mary certificate from the digital certificate contains Mary's particulars public key the CAS particulars and cryptographic data all the information needed to identify the entity with a high level of confidence the message itself is encrypted and decrypted in the same way but this time Bob makes sure that the public key came from Mary by validating the digital certificate how does one validate a digital certificate well that's a story for another time contact secure metrics PKI expert now and they would be glad to tell you more about PKI over lunch