Public Key Infrastructure (PKI)
PKI is a system of policies, processes, and technologies that creates, issues, stores, and revokes digital certificates and cryptographic keys. It establishes trust by binding identities to public keys, enabling secure communication and authentication.
# WHAT TEAMS RUN INTO
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Certificate lifecycle management is a constant operational burden. Certificates expire, must be rotated before expiration, and the discovery of expired or unused certificates happens after they break services.
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Certificate validation assumes trust. Applications receive a certificate and check whether it is signed by a trusted authority, but they often don't check whether that authority is legitimate or has been compromised.
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PKI scales poorly to service accounts and machines. Issuing and managing certificates for thousands of microservices becomes a Sisyphean task — the overhead of certificate management exceeds the benefit.
# WHY IT MATTERS
PKI is the backbone of encrypted communication and authenticated identity. Every HTTPS connection depends on PKI — the browser validates that the website certificate is signed by a trusted authority. But PKI works only as well as the trust model it relies on. If a Certificate Authority is compromised, attackers can issue certificates for any domain and impersonate any site. PKI is only as strong as the weakest Certificate Authority in the trust chain.