Hashing and Digital Certificates
What are some characteristics of hash functions?
Condenses arbitrary messages to fixed size, usually public and not keyed, used to detect changes to message, usually used to create digital signature
What are some of the commonly used hash algorithms?
MD5, SHA, SHA-1
What are some things that a certificate includes?
Name of Entity being Certified, Public key, Name of Certificate Authority, Serial Number, Expiration Date, Digital signature of the issuer
What are the different techniques for certificate dissemination?
Out-of-band, Public repositories, In-band, Issues
What is an example of chaining?
Passport having the seal of the government
What are some key issues in Key Pair Generation?
Performance, Assurance, Legal/Liabilities
What are the steps for issuing a digital certificate?
Registration, Key Pair Generation, Creation, Distribution
What is the subject name?
The entity whose public key is included in the certificate
Hash Functions can be applied to any sized message
True
Hash functions produce fixed-length output
True
What is industry standard certificate authority?
Verisign
What is a digital signature?
a data item which accompanies or is logically associated with a digitally encoded message
what is a message digest?
a fingerprint for a document
What are the two goals of digital signatures?
a guarantee of the source of the data, proof that the data has not been tampered with
what is a digital signature created with?
a persons private key
What is a digital signature verified with?
a persons public key
What is a digital certificate?
a signed statement by a trusted party that another party's public key to them
Who can start a certificate authority?
anyone
What is the valid time period?
begin time and end time
What is Chaining?
practice of signing a certificate with another private key that has a certificate public key
What is the subjects public key?
public key and public key method
what is the issuer name?
the entity whose private key signed the certificate
What is the signature method of a certificate?
the method used to sign the digital certificate
What is the purpose of the message digest?
to provide proof that a document has not been tampered with
