What is PKI? A Public Key Infrastructure definitive guide
Imagine you’re a system administrator at Home Depot. Just as you’re about to head home, you notice that your network has just authorized the connection of a new air-conditioner. Nothing too peculiar, right? The next morning, you wake up to find that terabytes of data including logins, passwords and customer credit card information have been transferred to hackers. Well, that’s exactly what happened in 2014, when a group of hackers, under the guise of an unassuming HVAC system, landed an attack that cost Home Depot over $17.5 million dollars, all over an incorrectly configured PKI. In this article, we’ll be conducting a crash course in PKI management.
So, what’s a PKI?
‘Public key infrastructure’ is a term that relates to a set of measures and policies that allow one to deploy and manage one of the most common forms of online encryption – public-key encryption. Apart from being a key-keeper for your browser, the PKI also secures a variety of different infrastructures, including internal communication within organizations, Internet of Things (IoT), peer to peer connection, and so on. There are two main types of PKIs:
• The Web PKI, also known as the “Internet PKI”, has been defined by RFC 5280 and refined by the CA/Browser Forum. It works by default with browsers and pretty much everything else that uses TLS (you probably use it every day).
• An Internal PKI – is the one you run for your own needs. We’re talking about encrypted local networks, data containers, enterprise IT applications or corporate endpoints like laptops and phones. Generally speaking, it can be used for anything that you want to identify.
At its core, PKI has a public cryptographic key that is used not to encrypt your data, but rather to authenticate the identities of the communicating parties. It’s like the bouncer outside an up-market club in Mayfair – you’re not getting in if you’re not on the list. However, without this ‘bouncer’, the concept of trustworthy online communication would be thrown to the wind.
So, how does it work?
PKI is built around two main concepts – keys and certificates. As with an Enigma machine, where the machine’s settings are used to encrypt a message (or establish a secure protocol), a key within a PKI is a long string of bits used to encrypt or decrypt encoded data. The main difference between the Enigma machine and a PKI is that with the latter, you have to somehow let your recipient know the settings used to encode the encrypted message.
The PKI gets its name because each party in a secured connection has two keys: public and private. A generic cipher protocol on the other hand, usually only uses a private one.
The public key is known to everyone and is used throughout the network to encode data, but the data cannot be accessed without a private key, which is used for decoding. These two keys are bound by complex mathematical functions which are difficult to reverse-engineer or crack by brute force. By the way, this principle is an epitome of asymmetrical cryptography.
So, this is how data is encrypted within a public key infrastructure. But let’s not forget that identity verification is just as important when dealing with PKIs – that’s where certificates come into play.
Digital Identity
PKI certificates are most commonly seen as digital passports containing lots of assigned data. One of the most important pieces of information in such a certificate relates to the public key: the certificate is the mechanism by which that key is shared – just like your Taxpayer Identification Number (TIN) or driver’s license, for instance.
But it’s not really valid unless it has been issued by some kind of entrusted authority. In our case, this is the certificate authority (CA). Here, there is an attestation from a trusted source that the entity is who they claim to be.
With this in mind, it becomes very easy to grasp what the PKI consists of:
• A certificate authority, which issues digital certificates, signs them with its public key and stores them in a repository for reference;
• A registration authority, which verifies the identities of those requesting digital certificates. A CA can act as its registration authority or can use a third party to do so;
• A certificate database that stores both the certificates, their metadata and, most importantly, their expiration dates;
• A certificate policy outlining the PKI's procedures (this is basically a set of instructions that allows others to judge how trustworthy a PKI is).
What is a PKI used for?
A PKI is great for securing web traffic – data flowing through the open internet can be easily intercepted and read if it isn't encrypted. Moreover, it can be difficult to trust a sender’s identity if there isn’t some kind of verification procedure in place.
But even though SSL/TLS certificates (that secure browsing activities) may demonstrate the most widespread implementation of PKI, the list doesn’t end there. PKI can also be used for:
• Digital signatures on software;
• Restricted access to enterprise intranets and VPNs;
• Password-free Wifi access based on device ownership;
• Email and data encryption procedures.
PKI use is taking off exponentially; even a microwave can connect to Instagram nowadays. This emerging world of IoT devices brings us new challenges and even devices seemingly existing in closed environments now require security. Taking the ‘evil air conditioner’ that we spoke about in the introduction as an example – gone are the days where we can take a piece of kit for face value. Some of the most compelling PKI use cases today centre around IoT. Auto manufacturers and medical device manufacturers are two prime examples of industries currently introducing PKI for IoT devices. Edison’s Electronic Health Check-up System would be a very good example here, but we’ll save that for a future deep-dive.
Is PKI a cure-all?
As with any technology – execution is sometimes more important than the design itself. A recent study by the Ponemon Institute surveyed nearly 603 IT and security professionals across 14 industries to understand the current state of PKI and digital certificate management practices. This study revealed widespread gaps and challenges, for example:
• 73% of security professionals admit that digital certificates still cause unplanned downtime and application outages;
• 71% of security professionals state that migration to the cloud demands significant changes to their PKI practices;
• 76% of security professionals say that failure to secure keys and certificates undermines the trust their organization relies upon to operate.
The biggest issue, however, is that most organizations lack the resources to support PKI. Moreover, only 38% of respondents claim they have the staff to properly maintain PKI. So for most organisations PKI maintenance becomes a burden rather than a cure-all.
To sum up, PKI is a silent guard that secures the privacy of ordinary online content consumers. However, in the hands of true professionals, it becomes a power tool that creates an encryption infrastructure that is almost infinitely scalable. It lives in your browser, your phone, your wifi access point, throughout the web and beyond. Most importantly, however, a correctly-configured PKI is the distance between your business and an imposter air conditioner that wants your hard-earned cash.
