NICUĆOR VATRÄ Faculty of Economic Cybernetics, Statistics and Informatics, The Bucharest Academy of Economic Studies, Piata Romana 6, Bucharest, Romania, email: nicusor.vatra@yahoo.com
Public key infrastructures have become the starting point for modern security mechanisms on the Internet, PKI is closely linked to the asymmetric key encryption, digital signatures, digital certificate and encryption services. The purpose of this paper is to briefly describe the general and essential concepts of the PKI to persons interested in security and secure commerce but with a low knowledge level about the Internet security. That's why this study begins by introducing some basic security concepts, which are needed to understand the PKI topics. This document intends to be a good starting point for those interested in the PKI concepts, without analyzing particular implementations.