The Anatomy of PKI PKI is a catchall term for the infrastructure required to manage digital certificates and highly secure encryption. Private and Public Keys Data encryption has been around for a long time. But combined with digital certificates within a PKI framework, it is much more secure. The system uses those keys to encrypt and decrypt e-mail documents, and authenticate the people who send and receive them.
Most people know why encryption of data is so important.
But digital certificates are fairly new to the United States. The reason for certificates is that even if someone uses a password to log on to the network and sends an encrypted message, you still don't know for sure who that person is. Digital certificates make it possible to identify and authenticate the people with whom you are doing business. If someone were to steal someone's ID and password, the thief could alter records and the owner would never know who the guilty part was. For safety and trust in e-business, customers need PKI to authenticate exactly who is sending and receiving documents.