Key management is a concept that often causes people anxiety when it comes to test preparation. After reviewing the material this week, describe briefly what digital keys are to you and how you think about them when you are doing your exercises. This may help some of your classmates. Read and comment on your classmates’ posts as well, and see if any of their analogies help you to master this concept.

Digital keys are employed to ensure that the data exchanged during an electronic transaction remains unchanged, and cannot be interfered with by any unauthorized third party.The digital key compose of the public and private keys which make up the digital key pair that comprise of two uniquely related cryptographic keys. The public key is what its name suggests- public it is made available to everyone through a publicly accessible repository or directory, on the other hand the private key must remain confidential to its respective owner. Because the key pairs are mathematically related, whatever is encrypted with a public key may only be decrypted by its corresponding private key and vice versa

When i do my exercises i take into consideration the fact that the system like every other maybe under threat of cyber attacks and malicious insiders because business applications and networks are now dependent on the use of digital credentials to control how users like myself  and entities access sensitive data and critical system resources as such PKIs are necessary to help ascertain the identity of different people and services.PKIs go way beyond the use of user IDs and passwords, employing cryptographic technologies such as digital signatures and certificates to create unique credentials that can be validated

                                              REFERENCE

Joel D. (2013), Which private keys and public keys can create a digital signature? Retrieved from www.searchsecurity.tectarget.com