Episode 84: PKI needs layered approach

When PKI is mentioned there are three terms that often come to mind: complicated, expensive and secure. The past few years have seen PKI deployments become simpler and more affordable but at the same time the security has become more questionable. Mark Yakabuski, vice president of HSM Product Management at SafeNet, talks about how PKI on its own is not good enough to secure computer networks and why a layered approach is necessary, including hardware security modules. "PKI is based in software. And in software, one of its largest advantages is that it’s very flexible," Yakabuski explains. "But software is inherently insecure for a few reasons. Software can be easily copied. Hardware and a hardware device that is designed to always manage the digital certificates and keys within a PKI infrastructure changes that dynamic."