PKI Initials Made Easy

How does pki work

hi this is Paul Turner with minifying today we're going to talk about public key infrastructure or PKI as it's commonly called they have heard this term and wondered what is a PKI so let's get into this to do this what we're going to do is we're going to walk through kind of a scenario where we've got Bob here he's got a web server will call his website Bob calm we got Sally and she wants to connect up to that website she's going to put in her password and so Bob and she want to make sure that that's secure so Bob's going to go get a certificate for that website for Bob calm so it goes to a certificate authority and says hey I'd like to get a certificate and the certificate authority needs to verify that Bob is actually allowed to request a certificate for Bob calm and so somebody needs to check that out or there needs to be some automated process for that and the role that's assigned for doing this is called a registration Authority this can either be a person or it can be an automated process and what that registration Authority is responsible for is ensuring that Bob is allowed to request certificates for that particular domain that they have control over that domain or he has control over that domain once a registration authority does that then they'll give approval to the certificate authority and the certificate authority will issue a certificate it's not typically through the registration authority as I've shown here it was just easier for me to get everything on the slide showing it that way now once the certificate has been issued just to cover terminology the web server to which that certificate has been issued is the subject of that certificate a lot like when you have a book and there's a character who's the subject of that book this in this case the web server is the subject of this particular certificate now when Sally connects up to the website now the server will turn around and return its certificate and she's going to rely on that certificate right she's let's say she's connecting for the first time she gets a certificate back and what she's really looking to ensure is that she's connected up to the right website that she's not going to be giving her password and other information too some rogue website so she's relying on that certificate and in that context we call her the relying party and this is very broadly used terminology in the industry to call her the relying party because she's relying on that certificate now next you might ask yourself okay so she's getting the certificate how does she know that that certificates authentic it's just you know this electronic document in a sense that she's received and she does in fact need something from the certificate authority that she can use to validate...