Thanks to this property, it is said that the digital
signature guarantees the integrity of the statement.
As can be easily imagined, integrity and nonrepudiation are
fundamental assurances, and digital signatures enjoy wide usage
as the main tool of enforcing those guarantees.
PKI and Certi?¬?cates
All the things described in this section are pure math. In real
systems, however, the keys we mentioned cannot live in a vacuum.
We must ?¬?nd ways of reliably associating a public key
with its owner, we need ways of generating and distributing keys
in the volumes required by enterprise grade usage, we should
make those keys available for consumption regardless of the
software package used, and we must satisfy many other requirements.
A Public Key Infrastructure, or PKI, is a collective name that
indicates the various parts that constitute a solution to the aforementioned
problems. In the reminder of this section, we explore
some of those components. For the sake of understanding, we
make some pretty dramatic simpli?¬?cations.
One of the key elements of a PKI is a certi?¬?cation authority, or
CA. The role of a CA is certifying that a certain key really represents
the public key of someone/something.
Pages:
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98