Whys And Hows of PKI: A Practical Guide for Small and Medium Size Business

From encrypting data delivered through the mail to verifying software packages and securing eCommerce transactions, PKI or Public Key Infrastructure is essential for all online communications. With the expanding and ever-changing enterprise infrastructure, it has become crucial for organizations to have their own mature and robust PKI setup to establish trust between their applications, devices, users, and systems on unreliable networks.

Surging data transmission and storage operations have proliferated PKI demand resulting in its market size surpassing $3 billion in 2022, with reports of 20% CAGR growth from 2023 to 2032 rife.

Large-scale adoption of public and private cloud, microservices, and DevOps by small and medium size companies have increased the demand for digital information encryption resulting in PKI market expansion. But why is PKI necessary, and how does it work? Let’s find the answers below.

What is PKI or Public Key Infrastructure?

PKI is the intricate ecosystem on which the inherently dangerous and insecure internet depends for security. PKI allows people to buy online and submit their sensitive personal details securely and safely. It is the blend of technologies, procedures, and governing policies, working in the background to secure all online communications.

Therefore, proper PKI training is extremely important for business professionals to optimize their operations using the right PKI management skills.

Today’s PKIs, widely used for digital signing, encryption, and authentication, are a core service supporting varied applications and use cases.

In brief, PKI allows you to:

• Protect Data You Transmit or Store Online

If you do not encrypt data when sending it online or even the channels you transmit data through, it travels in clear text format that any individual with explicit text knowledge can easily intercept and read. PKI ensures this does not take place through proper data encryption.

• Use Verifiable Identity To Your Advantage

You can accurately identify who or what server you connect with if you have a digital identity. It also enables you to authenticate yourself for easy access to protected resources in certain circumstances.

• Offers Assurance of No Data Modification

PKI ensures data integrity by proving the legitimacy of your software, emails, and other forms of data.

Why Is PKI Necessary?

When you send any information online, it moves from one server to another in readable format until it reaches its intended destination. So, there are several places where unauthorized users can intercept your information. Further, if the data isn’t encrypted, unauthorized users can manipulate, steal or read it without your consent.

PKI, along with different digital keys and certificates, helps keep sensitive data out of the hands of such users.

PKI is essential for top security situations. With private and public cryptographic keys and digital signing, it ultimately secures various applications. Consider PKI for website security, for instance.

Installing a TLS/SSL certificate on a website makes the HTTPS and padlock appear in the browser. These two security indicators ensure secure data transmission from the browser to the website server. This means no unintended third party can intercept and read your data.

Nevertheless, being secure is not the same as being safe. Scammers can easily crack TLS or SSL certificates on their fake sites, just like legitimate companies, because these certificates require the lowest validation level.

As per 2020 reports by The Anti-Phishing Working Group, 84% of phishing sites use TLS certificates. So, unless you are aware of the user’s identity at the other end of that secure connection, your data is not safe, and that’s where PKI comes into effective play.

Six Important PKI Components

To better understand the PKI work procedure, first know about its components:

• Digital Signatures: These signatures guarantee that a file, data, or message has not been changed in any way. The signatures feature an encrypted hash of the message to ensure data integrity by making it so no user can change the message without the end-user or recipient finding out the same.
• X.509 Digital Certificates: These certificates feature information about the owner’s identity, a key, and the certificate authority’s digital signature. The certificates include S/MIME client authentication certificates, SSL/TLS website security certificates, document signing certificates, and code signing certificates.
• Private and Public Key Pairs, both symmetric and asymmetric: PKI key pairs encrypt and decrypt data. While in symmetric encryption, both parties use the same single key for communication, in asymmetric encryption, everyone shares a public key along with a matching private key which is kept secret.
• Certificate Authorities: They make the entire PKI system reliable by verifying issued certificates and parties. Without CAs in place, PKI would not be able to work as anyone could issue certificates to themselves authorizing their identity as Bill Gates or Amazon.com or whoever they feel like mimicking.
• Chain of Trust: It is an assortment of certificates, mainly intermediate, leaf, and root certificates, that connect back to the issuing CA who signed off on it.
• Appropriate Certificate Management Policies, Tools, and Processes: This involves using different certificate management tools, like certificate manager.

The Bottom Line

PKI is essential to individuals and businesses alike, but for it to work, ensure using valid digital keys and certificates issued by public CAs, manage the lifecycle of digital keys and certificates properly and ensure they are installed properly with the site configured correctly.