Glossary
PKI
PKI is the system that makes digital certificates trustworthy. It's how browsers know to trust a certificate - a chain of trusted authorities vouching for each other.
What is PKI?
Public Key Infrastructure - the framework of policies and technology for managing digital certificates and public-key encryption.
Why Should You Care?
PKI failures directly expose organizations to man-in-the-middle attacks, data interception, and credential forgery. Compromised or misconfigured certificate authorities can issue fraudulent certificates that attackers use to impersonate legitimate services, making attacks invisible to users and security tools. Revocation failures mean organizations continue trusting certificates even after theft or compromise, leaving application and API traffic vulnerable. For any organization managing authentication, financial transactions, or sensitive communications, PKI weaknesses create a direct pathway to breach.
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Real-World Example
When Comodo's certificate authority infrastructure was breached in 2011, attackers obtained fraudulent SSL certificates for major domains including Gmail, Skype, and Yahoo. Certificates that browsers would automatically trust could then be used to mount man-in-the-middle attacks on user authentication sessions. This incident demonstrated that a single CA compromise could undermine the chain of trust for millions of users, accelerating industry-wide improvements in CA security and adoption of certificate pinning as an additional verification layer.
How to Protect Against PKI
- 1.
Understand your organization's PKI infrastructure
- 2.
Rotate internal certificates before expiration
Related Terms
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