Introduction to PKI - Public Key Infrastructure

Overview

Public Key Infrastructure is a system for supporting digital signatures and document encryption for an organization. It is fast becoming essential for an effective secure commerce and to fulfill general security and authentication requirements over non-secure networks (like the Net). The banking services are the most popular usage of this technology, which is quickly spreading over all the applications that need security to be fully operational.

The objective of this document is to briefly describe the general and basic concepts of the PKI to people interested in security and secure commerce (sometimes called S-commerce) but with a low knowledge level about the Internet security. That's why this study starts by introducing some basic security concepts, which are needed to understand the PKI topics.