Essential Guide to Certificates, Encryption, and Signatures
Secure Messaging
Integrated systems have to deal with tough challenges when it comes to secure messaging. If system A is sending a message to system B, this requires the implementation of important security measures. These can be summarized by:
- Authentication, where System B must authenticate System A before accepting its message
- Data Privacy, means that an intruder – should ever be able to peek into the message – must not be able to see sensitive data
- And Data Accuracy – or Integrity – which means that If an intruder intercepts the message and modifies it, this modification must be detected by System B
Secure messaging is achieved using public and private keys. These are numerical values that are mathematically linked. An organization generates these keys, it keeps the private key as its own secret, and distributes the public key to any organization that wants to do exchange secure messages. Because these keys are mathematically linked, data encrypted with the public key can only be decrypted by the private key.
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