The public key infrastructure is a concept used in information security and makes it possible for computers that are communicating over the internet to authenticate and verify the encryption of information being sent between them. During any communication, the two parties that are involved will refer to the public key infrastructure to ensure that they encode the messages that they intend to pass to each other according to the format and standard that has been placed in the public key.
There is a public key for the two parties to refer to whenever they are encoding and decoding the messages as well as private leys which are used to verify the identity of the sender and the receiver without mixing them up and causing confusion. The standards for encryption that work on the public key infrastructure are up to date and scaled to align with the latest standards in information security such as the recommended length of encryption keys and the number of bits being used at every step of the encryption process.
The benefit of the public key infrastructure is in being able to protect information as it is moved over a network and the computers that are involved in the communication have a common reference to base their encryption and decryption on as well as preventing confusion during the entire communication process. The public key infrastructure also provides a common basis for encryption and decryption of information that is being moved over a network to refer from and the programs that are being used in the communication process can also be able to have better communication.
The encryption and decryption can seem to be entirely transparent, but the key and the secret information required for securing the communication is abstracted from the parties that are involved in the communication process. Additionally, the use of public key infrastructure to keep information secure makes it harder to break the communication sessions established for passing the messages and information between the two parties.
Once the communication session has been established, the public key infrastructure ensures that the encryption sequences are always kept random and they change depending on how the information is passing between the parties involved in the communication. The use of the public key infrastructure also makes it easier for the communicating parties to hide information better and have more secure communication sessions that cannot be broken, are much easier to set up, and are entirely transparent without getting complicated or difficult to understand and operate.
Modern cryptography borrows heavily from the increasing computing power that is on modern computers and devices and makes it possible for these computers to communicate much more easily as well as utilizing the massive computation resources that are available on modern computers to up the standards of information security which also ensures that the keys used in any communication session are hot off the processors and very difficult to crack even for a hacker that has massive computing strength to use in attempting to break the communication and steal information in real-time.
