The public key infrastructure (PKI) is the set of hardware, software, policies, processes, and procedures required to create, manage, distribute, use, store, and revoke digital certificates and public keys.
A PKI consists of:
- A certificate authority (CA) that stores, issues, and signs the digital certificates.
- A registration authority (RA) that verifies the identity of entities requesting that their digital certificates be stored at the CA.
- A central directory-A secure location in which keys are stored and indexed.
- A certificate management system managing the access to stored certificates, the delivery of the certificates to be issued, and so on.
- A certificate policy stating the PKI's requirements concerning its procedures. The purpose is to allow outsiders to analyze the PKI's trustworthiness.
- Dell is uniquely positioned by owning the hardware design, the firmware design, and the OS runtime environment. NativeEdge can assure the five key pillars under the zero-trust architecture asset trust (devices, network, applications, users, and data), NativeEdge can become an integral part of that PKI. With this, it assures these entities can cryptographically signed and protect the trustworthiness of these assets.