Understanding Digital Certificates Part 2

CompTIA Study Guide for Digital Certificates, Digital Signatures and PKI

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Digital Certificates
• Digital Signatures
• CompTIA
• Security +
• PKI
• Public Key
• Private Key
• Study Guide
• Computer Security

[J2897Tutorials]

3:11 "Now sometimes the CA may keep a copy of the certificate it generated; including the Private Key."

Including the Private Key? Are you certain of this? The owner of a CA seems to have led me in to believing that the Private Key is generated locally on my PC and not at the server.

[2arprodlim3]

@J2897Tutorials

If you are using PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) where you generate your own keys this would be true. However, many companies that have their own Certificate Authority (CA) server will use key archival to store a copy of the private key that has been generated. If an employee leaves the organization or their hardware crashes then there is a backup copy of the key. You should make a copy of your own key too in case of hardware crashes.

[J2897Tutorials]

@2arprodlim3 I do have a backup. I'm just not happy with the issuing CA being able to keep a copy of my Private Key. I can see why it's necessary within an organization. But to give them away for free over the internet, whilst misleading the user into thinking that he/she is the only one with a copy of the Private Key - the way the CEO of Comodo did to me - it should not be possible.

Perhaps the PKI system should be altered so that the user can verify whether a backup copy was kept.