Back-doors, A New PKI Infrastructure and A New “Trust” Infrastructure for the Internet?

So what’s the core of trust on the Internet? Well, like it or not, it’s the PKI (Public Key Infrastructure). This involves the setup of trusted places to find Alice’s public key. So, could a nation-state decide to diverge from the global PKI infrastructure, and set up its own one? The implementation of sanctions against Russia at the current time may force Russia to diverge from the global trust infrastructure and setup its own one.

So what is PKI?

Within digital signing, Bob has a key pair: a public key (pk) and a private key (sk). When Bob wants to prove his identity to Alice, he takes a hash of a message and then signs this with his private key. He passes this and the message to Alice, and who then checks the signature and message against his public key (Figure 1).

But, how does Bob get his public key to Alice in a trusted way? Well, this is where PKI comes in, and where Trent takes Bob’s public key and produces an X.509 digital certificate that contains Bob’s public key. Trent then digitally signs this certificate with his private key. When the certificate is received by Alice, she will check the validity of the certificate by checking it against Trent’s public key. Trent’s public key is stored on her system in a trustworthy way…