November 1999
Intermediate to advanced
320 pages
8h 46m
English
This section gives a brief overview of the cryptographic mechanisms used to enable the PKI services of authenticity, integrity, and confidentiality. See the Handbook of Applied Cryptography [MvOV97] for further discussion.
The PKI service of authentication (as opposed to the non-PKI operation of initial authentication to the local environment, which may involve single- or multi-factor authentication including passwords or biometric devices) employs the cryptographic technique of a digital signature. The signature may be computed over the hash of one of the following three values:
Some data to be authenticated
Some request that the user intends to send to a remote device
A random challenge issued by a remote device ...