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Public Key Infrastructure (PKI)

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PKI: trust without prior contact

The fundamental challenge: your browser has never talked to bank.example.com before. How does it know the server is legitimate and not an attacker?

PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) solves this with a chain of trust: browser vendors pre-install a list of trusted Root CAs. Any certificate signed (directly or through intermediates) by a trusted root is trusted automatically.

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