Nobody ever said implementing a public-key infrastructure would be easy, but a pair of experts at the 2006 International Conference on Network Security said last week that using PKI is often harder than it needs to be. “We haven’t been as successful as I wish we had been,
PKI promises to be a pretty good way to authenticate users, sign documents electronically and secure data. It uses a pair of mathematically related encryption keys to secure data. One key is kept private while the other is made public, allowing communications between individuals without exchanging secret keys. Using a public key, messages can be sent that can only be read by someone possessing the corresponding private key.

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