Certified authorities are usually third-party firms that specialize in generating digital certificates. It also secures accounts by providing single-sign-on, multi-factor authentication for businesses across the world. PKI works by encrypting data in this case, digital certificate with a cryptographic key, while having a separate key for decrypting it.
The point here is to have one key for encryption and another for decryption. One of them is a private key, held by the key owner, while the other is a public key, shared with the public. Depending on the usage, the private key can either be the encryption key or the decryption key.
The process works like this. The owner of the certificate first encrypts it with the private key, then hands over the public key to the bank. The magic here is that the decryption key can only decrypt the exact same data that the encryption key has encrypted. This means that if the decryption key can successfully decrypt a set of data, the integrity of the data can be verified.
Had the data been illegally modified by unauthorized parties in the transmission process, the decryption key would fail to decrypt the data see figure 1. Now imagine another situation where Aiden needs to send a confidential message to Bob. In this case, there are three things that Aiden and Bob would want to watch out for:. PKI can easily ensure all these three criteria are met. How does it work in this case? After Bob receives the message, he simply needs to decrypt it with his private key.
Note that different from the case of authenticating digital certificates, in this case, the owner of the keys is the receiver, not the sender, and that the public key is used as the encryption key while the private key is used as the decryption key see figure 2. For instance, if you're trying to buy an SSL certificate for a website at example.
Once you acquire the certificate, you can upload it to your web server. The next obvious question, of course, is how you know you can trust the CA: after all, in the case of TLS, there's no centralized body in charge of the standard and anyone can set themselves up as a certificate authority. A bad actor in that role could wreak havoc. In practice, OS and browser makers like Apple, Microsoft, and Mozilla are the de facto gatekeepers here, maintaining lists of trusted CAs and blacklisting those who slip.
The decisions on which CAs to trust have high stakes, as a showdown between Google and Symantec over what Google felt were Symantec's lax standards made clear. But as we'll discuss in a moment, it isn't the only kind. Other PKIs will have different standards for issuing certificates, but the important thing to keep in mind is that any PKI system must have some method by which CAs can authenticate users, and that all participants in the PKI system trust that method.
A web of trust system is better suited to self-contained networks or organizations, or small communities of users. PKI is great for securing email for the same reason that it's great for securing web traffic: because data flowing over the open internet can be easily intercepted and read if it isn't encrypted, and because it can be difficult to trust that a sender is who they claim to be if there isn't some way to authenticate their identity.
As we've seen, establishing near-universal PKI for web traffic has been relatively easy because most of the necessary infrastructure is built into web browsers and servers.
Email is accessed through more heterogenous clients, which makes things a bit trickier. Support for these kinds of email protections are built into clients like Microsoft Outlook. The rise of web-based email in recent years has seen a step backwards in this regard. Having PKI in place does not guarantee security. Companies sometimes fail to deploy or manage it properly. A recent study by the Ponemon Institute surveyed nearly 17, IT and security practitioners about their key and certificate management practices.
The report identified the most significant risks associated with securing digital identities using PKI:.
Fifty-five percent said their organizations had experience four or more incidents in the past two years. Unsecured digital identities undermine trust. Fifty-nine percent of respondents say cybercriminals misusing keys and certificates increases the need to secure them. Failed audits and CA compromise are the biggest threats. Attackers can use compromised or rogue CAs to deliver malware to conduct man-in-the-middle or phishing attacks. Security or compliance audits might fail to detect vulnerabilities due to unenforced key management policies or inadequate key management practices.
More encryption increases operational complexity and cost. Two -thirds of respondents are adding layers of encryption to meet regulatory and IT policy requirements.
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