Alan Stevens reports. The rush to do business over the Internet throws up all kinds of technological challenges, not least of which is the need to keep transactions secure.
Encryption is one way of doing just that, but it's only part of the solution.
There's also a need for a mechanism to provide electronically the same level of trust provided by traditional props, such as cheques, signatures, purchase orders and so on. In order to understand what a PKI is all about, it's necessary first to have an appreciation of the underlying technologies, starting with encryption, which can be broadly divided into two categories. The first of these is shared secret, or symmetric key encryption, where the same key is used to both scramble and unscramble the data involved. This works well on a private network, but on the Internet gives rise to all kinds of different issues. The alternative, public key encryption, addresses this problem by using a pair of keys to scramble and unscramble the data.