It is a modern branch of cryptography in which algorithms employ a pair of keys (a public key and a private key) and use a different component of the pair for different steps of the algorithm.
For encryption, when A wants to ensure confidentiality for data it sends to B, it encrypts the data with a public key provided by B. Only B has the matching private key that is needed to decrypt the data.
For signature, when A wants to ensure data integrity or provide authentication for data it sends to B, it uses its private key to sign the data (i.e., create a digital signature based on the data). To verify the signature, B uses the matching public key that A has provided.
In order to ascertain a user’s public key is valid, the public key and relevant information (e.g. name, organization, email address, etc) of the user can be put together and digitally signed (endorsed) by a trusted Certification Authority (CA). The resulting digital document is known as a digital certificate.
Yes. SecureAge provides native generation of RSA key with strength up to 4096-bit. When deployed in conjunction with SecureAge SA PKI, SecureAge acts as a full PKI client with the capability of performing certificate request, retrieval, revocation, and renewal. When used with any third party CA, SecureAge provides a complete interface to import key and certificate in PKCS#12 file format and PKCS#11 smart card and token format.
Yes. SecureAge supports LDAP for certificate look up in both manual and automatic modes. In the automatic mode, SecureAge LDAP supports will automatically search and download missing certificate from the LDAP server. This allows the user to send encrypted email seamlessly even when he or she may not have the recipient’s certificate locally.
Yes. SecureAge provides a comprehensive support for CRL checking, update and retrieval. CRL is always checked every time a certificate is used in any SecureAge operation, including email signing, verification, encryption and decryption. CRL can also be configured for automatic download from LDAP and Web server. Any certificate that comes with valid Certificate Distribution Point (CDP) will also be updated automatically.