Identify and describe each of the following acronyms.

Question

a) PKI
b) RSA
c) CRL
d) AES
e) SET

Answer 1

a) Public-key Infrastructure integrates public-key cryptography with digital certificates and certificate authorities to
authenticate parties in a transaction.
b) RSA stands for Rivest, Shamir and Adleman, the founders of RSA Security, Inc. RSA's encryption and authentica-
tion technologies are used by most Fortune 1000 companies and leading e-commerce businesses. The RSA public-key
encryption algorithm is the most commonly used public-key algorithm.
c) A Certificate Revocation List, usually held by banks or certificate authorities, contains information about any
revoked digital certificates. Digital certificates may be revoked for several reasons such as a compromised private key or
certificate expiration.
d) The United States is in the process of selecting a new, more secure standard for symmetric encryption that will be
called the Advanced Encryption Standard. The AES will replace the DES as the new standard. Several companies are com-
peting to have their algorithms selected as the new AES. The algorithms are being evaluated based on strength, efficiency,
speed and other characteristics.
e) Secure Electronic Transaction is a security protocol developed by Visa and MasterCard specifically to protect online
credit-card transactions. SET uses digital certificates for authentication of each party in the transaction and public-key cryp-
tography to secure the information as it is passed over the Web. One of the benefits of SET is that the merchant never actu-
ally sees the credit card information. Rather, that information is passed directly to the merchant bank. This prevents
merchants from storing private information on databases that could potentially be accessed by hackers or internal
employees.