set of hardware, software, people, policies, and procedures needed to create, manage, store, distribute, and revoke Certificates based on Asymmetric Cryptography

Note 1 to entry: The core PKI functions are to register users and issue their public-key Certificates, to revoke Certificates when required, and to archive data needed to validate Certificates at a much later time. Key pairs for data Confidentiality could be generated by a Certificate authority (CA); it is a good idea to require a Private Key owner to generate their own key pair as it improves security because the Private Key would never be transmitted according to IS Glossary. See PKI and X509 PKI for more details on Public Key Infrastructures.