The Most Profitable Industry In The World, Just Became A Little Less Profitable .. and Another Nail in the RSA Coffin

Do you really understand how digital certificates work? If not, be worried, as PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) is at the core of security on the Internet. But what is a digital certificate, and why is it so important? Well there’s a public version (that anyone can have) and a private version (that no-one should be able to get). The private one has a key pair — with a unique public and a associated private key— and the public one just has the public key. The magic is that these certificates is that they are signed by a trusted entity. And so if Bob and Alice trust Trent, then Trent can sign a certificate to say that he has proven Bob’s identity to Alice, and vice-versa.

So how can you make $50 for less than a minute’s work? Well, you issue digital certificates. Basically you get someone to send you some ID, and you quickly check that and issue them with a digital certificate. Basically all you have to do is to protect your main encryption key that you will sign the digital certificate with, and then generate an encryption key pair (a public and a private key — normally these are 2,048-bit RSA keys). If this is not profitable enough, you tell them that it will only be valid for a year, and get them back next year for an even faster verification.