The underpinning concept of PKI, where one person encrypts a message knowing that the recipient has the secret key to decrypt it, has been in practice for thousands of years. Today, it’s most familiar use is probably online communications. To ensure data safety when communicating with others, the data is encrypted and can only be decrypted by a party with the correct private key.
However, considering the billions of users sending and receiving data, it’s not possible for everyone to know every secret key that another person or device is using. The solution is to encrypt data using secure and authenticated public keys, which can then be decrypted using paired private keys, which is the ‘public’ part of the fundamentals explained.
The whole system is a vital part of the internet’s structure. Smooth encryption and decryption of data by individual users enables secure data transmission, communication, and authentication.
With the basics explained, let’s take a look at the processes of PKI infrastructure. Past encryption systems, such as the Caesar cipher, used relatively basic methods to disguise the message they were protecting. Due to the value of deciphering secret messages, decryption efforts, like those happening at Bletchley Park during WW2, became increasingly important. As a result, encryption had to become more complicated to try to stay ahead at intertrust.com.
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