Sometimes, when I talk to customers and engineers about encrypted traffic, I find that they know that Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) is more secure and works with the TCP port, 443. But most of them do not really know what the role of a certificate is and how this encryption and decryption works. It is very important to know how it works, as it makes deployment and management of PKI easy. Most of the PKI-related issues I have worked on are to do with the misunderstandings of core technologies and components related to it, rather than service-level issues.
PKI in action
Symmetric keys versus asymmetric keys
There are two types of cryptographic methods used to encrypt data:
- Symmetric keys: Symmetric methods work in exactly the...