CSIA 410 Cryptology – PKI Introduction and Additional Resources

Do you trust me? If you’re smart you won’t. Not unless you know me and know that I’m a boy scout. LOL. But seriously, would you trust me with your personal data or access to your bank accounts and credit cards?

In this section you’ll learn about something called the Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) and SSL/TLS that were set up to provide a system that is used to distribute public keys and create secure network connections in a trustworthy manner. Every time you use a web site that uses HTTPS you are using PKI and TLS, plus placing your trust in the system.

While you’ll learn about the technical details behind PKI and TLS, there’s another huge question that you need to be thinking about. Which is “Who do you trust … ?”

Additional Learning Resources

Some background on why PKI and TLS are needed

These videos provide a very good explanation of SSL/TLS and the TLS Handshake

These items provide a decent background on PKI and digital certificates:

  • Intro to Digital Certificates (Youtube)
  • What are certificates? (Youtube) – Note that this video provides a super basic explanation of certificates. It’s a little (very) old, as it talks about Windows 8, and some of you may not be old enough to remember Win 8. But in any case the core theory of the explanation is still applicable.

These items go deeper into PKI and TLS. You may not need to know this level of detail, but these items should help fill in any gaps or answer questions about how PKI and TLS work at the technical level.