Spring Security - Third Edition

Understanding the purpose of a public key infrastructure

This chapter focuses on setting up a self-contained development environment for the purposes of learning and education. However, in most cases where you are integrating Spring Security into an existing client certificate-secured environment, there will be a significant amount of infrastructure (usually a combination of hardware and software) in place to provide functionality, such as certificate granting and management, user self-service, and revocation. Environments of this type define a public key infrastructure—a combination of hardware, software, and security policies that result in a highly secure authentication-driven network ecosystem.

In addition to being used for web application ...