What Is Public Key Infrastructure (PKI)?

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Transcript:

PKI is a way of using digital certificates to protect sensitive data and secure online communications. Digital certificates also provide unique digital identities to users, applications, and devices in an online world. PKI uses public-key cryptography, which is a cryptographic system with two types of keys: private and public. The private key is secret and the public key is made available to anyone on the internet. When messages are encrypted with the public key, they can only be decrypted by the corresponding private key. That process helps establish private and public key ownership, so only the intended parties can read the message.

A certificate authority, CA, is a trusted third party organization that issues digital certificates, proving that the public key on the certificate belongs to the named subject. This allows other parties to rely upon signatures about the private key corresponding to the certified public key. PKI is important because it helps organizations establish trusted signatures, encryptions, and identities, which can secure websites, support email signing and encryption, and secure local networks.

PKI is used in situations where secure communication, authentication, and data protection are crucial. For example, you might use PKI when you are securing websites to make sure that communication between the web server and the client is encrypted and authenticated, securing email messages to keep them confidential, securing local networks to authenticate identities and provide other security services, or digital signing to make sure legal signatures are protected from tampering.

Obviously, PKI has a lot of benefits, but to deploy it in-house, you need highly skilled IT teams to run it. And unfortunately, admins that can run PKI successfully are often hard to find and even harder to retain. Many organizations still use outdated manual methods to deploy and manage PKI, but public key infrastructure relies on a strong identity and access management, IAM, strategy.

The best way to create that strategy is by partnering with a platform designed to help IT admins with access management like JumpCloud. Check out the link in the description to learn more about JumpCloud and be sure to subscribe to this channel for more educational videos.