Public key infrastructure (PKI)

Public key infrastructure (PKI)

About

A public key infrastructure (PKI) is the management and database system for:

of digital certificates and public key

A central problem with the use of public key cryptography is confidence/proof that a particular public key is authentic, in that it is correct and belongs to the person or entity claimed, and has not been tampered with or replaced by a malicious third party. In short,

public key infrastructure validate the ownership of a public key (associate a public key with an identity)

Implementation

PKI is itself often used as a synonym for the hierarchical CA implementation but there is other implementation.

Hierarchical Certificate Authority

The X.509 Hierarchical Certificate Authority PKI uses a hierarchy of certificate authority that signs the certificate.

Web of trust

On the contrary with the previous pki, the web of trust model is a decentralized model that is defined in the OpenPgp standard

Local trust model

e.g., Simple public key infrastructure (SPKI)

Documentation / Reference





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