What is a PKI Certificate
A few years back most of the people were talking of the year 2000 to be known as the year of PKI and most of them also believed that the market was ready to take all of the advantages of the PKI or the Public Key Infrastructure as it is most commonly known. It is basically a concept that has been mostly discussed in the IT security world that is most widely used for authentication and also has a lot to do with the public key pairs. So, basically you need to understand what PKI is and where exactly it would fit in your organizations security.
This infrastructure uses a digital certificate as an aid to its authentication mechanism so it is simply built to manage a better certificate along with their keys. A digital certificate is also one of the most reliable identities which the user claiming to be the sole owner of a key has. It is also called as asymmetric encryption and is very much popular as it is much better and secure when compared to the key encryption.
The two are mathematically related keys and the difference is that one is public and other is private key. But both of them work together so one is practically used for encrypting and the other one is used for decrypting. The public key is usually made known to almost anyone who simply wants himself to get engaged in the encrypted communications with the owner key. One should never share the private key with anyone as this part of the key is only made available to its owner.
This whole thing makes a more secured system, as encrypting and decrypting may not be shared by anyone and everyone. The main problem with this public key encryption is that it may be very difficult to say if the key is really owned by the owner who claims it. Any of the user could simply advertise that a particular key belongs to him but it may not be belonging. So here is where digital certificates come in to play.
Here, a trusted third party who is usually as the certification authority, issues a certificate and does all of the verification of the owner. So in this process other users and computers can simply rely on the verified person. This may also be called as the insurance of the identifier or even as some identification card issued by the government entities.
As the issuer has already checked out with the identity of the holder so others can simply depend on it. These certificates simply contain all the information of the holder along with their key, expiratory date and also a digital signature which is called as the authority. Managing these digital certificates could be a little bit of complex so, the PKI was simply created in order to provide a framework for renewal and management. Most of the industry standards these PKI and their certificates. So, they are simply implemented in the system for the use of the user whether commercial or private.
