Public key cryptography and security certificates

Mohit Arora, Freescale
EETimes (12/5/2011 10:21 AM EST)

Public key cryptography offers ultimate security being based asymmetric keys and is the backbone for popular protocols like security sockets layer (SSL) to be able to communicate securely between web-servers and browsers. However a whole ecosystem is based on passing or exchanging security certificates.

This article explains public key cryptography and the role of security certificates and the way they are used by the secure protocols to provide ultimate security.

The encryption using a public key cryptography or private /public key pair ensures that the data can be encrypted by one key but can only be decrypted by the other key pair. The keys are similar in nature and can be used alternatively: what one key encrypts, the other key pair can decrypt. The key pair is based on prime numbers and their length in terms of bits ensures the difficulty of being able to decrypt the message without the key pairs.

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