PKI in action

Sometimes when I talk to customers and engineers about encrypted traffic, most of them know SSL is more secure for communication and works with the TCP port, 443. But most of them do not really know what a certificate is and how this encryption and decryption works. It is very important to know how it works, and then the deployment and management becomes easy. Most of the PKI related issues I have worked on are related to the misunderstandings of core technologies, components and concepts related to it, rather than service-level issues.

Symmetric keys versus asymmetric keys

There are two types of cryptographic methods used to encrypt the data in computer world. Let's now look at them:

• Symmetric keys: Symmetric...