PKI - bobbae/gcp GitHub Wiki

A public key infrastructure (PKI) is a set of roles, policies, hardware, software and procedures needed to create, manage, distribute, use, store and revoke digital certificates and manage public-key encryption. The purpose of a PKI is to facilitate the secure electronic transfer of information for a range of network activities such as e-commerce, internet banking and confidential email. It is required for activities where simple passwords are an inadequate authentication method and more rigorous proof is required to confirm the identity of the parties involved in the communication and to validate the information being transferred.

https://smallstep.com/blog/everything-pki/

X.509

X.509 is a standardized machine-readable certificate format for the certificate documents. Originally, it was an ISO standard, but these days it is maintained by the Internet Engineering Task Force as RFC 3280.

CA

A certificate authority or certification authority (CA) is an entity that issues digital certificates.

Google Certificate Authority Service

Google Certificate Authority Service simplifies the deployment and management of private CAs without managing infrastructure.