PKI

PKI — Public Key Infrastructure

Cryptography · Advanced

The policies, roles, and technology used to issue, distribute, renew, and revoke certificates and manage the keys they represent.

A certificate is one document. This is the whole system around it: who may issue one, how long it lives, and how the world finds out it was revoked.

Example: A company runs an internal authority that issues certificates to laptops and publishes a revocation list. That system is PKI.

Common misconception

It is not a single certificate and not a brand of encryption software. It is the operating system around public keys.