Applied Cryptography and PKI: Encryption, Signatures and Key Management
1. Introduction Applied cryptography and PKI is the discipline behind almost everything we take for granted on a connected system: the encryption of an HTTPS session, the signature of a document, mutual authentication between services and the chain of trust that makes your browser trust a certificate issued by a public CA. Yet textbook theory collides with day-to-day reality: keys that have not been rotated in years, expired certificates taking production services down, and signatures validated poorly because nobody checked the hash algorithm. In this article I cover applied cryptography and PKI from the practitioner’s point of view: the cryptographic …

