Introduction to the Public Key Infrastructure for the Internet

Book excerpt: The practical, results-focused PKI primer for every security developer and IT manager!-- Easy-to-understand explanations of the key concepts behind PKI and PKIX.-- Answers the most important questions about PKI deployment, operation, and administration.-- Covers trust models, certificate validation, credentials management, key rollover, and much more.The Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) and related standards are gaining powerful momentum as a solution for a wide range of security issues associated with electronic commerce. This book represents the first complete primer on PKI for both technical and non-technical professionals. Unlike academic treatises on PKI, this book is focused on getting results -- and on answering the critical questions implementers and managers have about PKI deployment, operation, and administration. The book begins with an overview of the security problems PKI is intended to solve; the fundamentals of secret key cryptography, and the significant challenges posed by key distribution. Messaoud Benantar introduces the foundations of public key cryptography, and the essential role played by public key assurance systems. Once you understand the basics, he introduces PKIX, the Internet Public Key Infrastructure standard, and shows how to leverage it in constructing secure Internet solutions. Benantar covers PKIX standards, notational language, and data encoding schemes; the Internet PKI technology; PKI trust models; certificate va