Managing public keys

A PKI is responsible for securely delivering verified public keys, which provides assurance or trust that you are communicating securely with a verified entity. A PKI achieves this goal by using a digitally signed certificate.

In this section, we'll discuss what's involved when creating a certificate. We'll see how malicious actors can intercept and spoof certificates, along with how pinning can help prevent this from happening. Finally, we'll compare trusted root certificates with self-signed certificates and see the steps to take to create a self-signed certificate on a Windows machine.

First, let's step through creating a certificate.

Creating a certificate

When a company wants to create a digital certificate that links a public key with their organization, they will go through a formal process. The first step is to create a certificate signing request (CSR) that is sent to the CA.

Let's see what's involved...