Microsoft® Windows® 2000 Security Handbook

PGP "Web of Trust"

I discussed the popular X.509 standard for certificates. Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) has its own concept of certificates, which I will discuss briefly to acquaint you with a mechanism other then the X.509. PGP's answer to certificate verification and trust is not based on the concept of Certificate Authorities. Instead, a PGP certificate takes a PGP public key, computes a signature using a private key from another key pair, and then attaches the result to the original public key. In other words, any PGP user can certify another PGP user. PGP refers to this concept as the trusted introducer.

Look at a real life example of this mechanism. Que needs chapters written for a Windows 2000 book. They approach one of their authors from ...