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Public Key Infrastructures

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Businesses are becoming ever more dependent on digital information and electronic transactions, and as a result face stringent data privacy compliance challenges and data security regulations. With the enterprise increasingly under threat of cyber attacks and malicious insiders, business applications and networks are now dependent on the use of digital credentials to control how users and entities access sensitive data and critical system resources. Public key infrastructures (PKIs) are necessary to help ascertain the identity of different people, devices, and services. In a nutshell, PKIs go way beyond the use of user IDs and passwords, employing cryptographic technologies such as digital signatures and digital certificates to create unique credentials that can be validated beyond reasonable doubt and on a mass scale ("What is pki?" n.d., p. 1). …show more content…

Third parties normally trust digital certificates signed by public CAs like VeriSign, and SecureNet. Additionally, the overhead of managing a public CA is significantly lower than that of in-house administration. Another advantage of using a public CA is convenience; it solves the problem of distributing the key for certificates. Using Public CA can be cost effective particularly if company has a large number of private users that need public certificates for client authentication. Like with in-house CA, there are several disadvantages to public CA. The integration between your organization and the public CA is limited. While the overhead is lower than in-house CA, there is still a cost associated with using one and you will usually pay per certificate. There is also less flexibility in managing those certificates as it is being handled by an outside entity. Which one is better suited for the company could depend on the size of the company, it funding and staffing ("Comparisons," n.d., p.

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