PKI Explained – Trust Models, X.509 & Digital Signatures | Udemy

This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.

Artificial intelligence tools are used selectively in this course to support content refinement and the creation of visual assets. AI-assisted tools help improve clarity, structure, and presentation of technical concepts, as well as generate illustrative diagrams and images. All technical architecture decisions, explanations, and learning objectives are designed, reviewed, and curated by the instructor to ensure accuracy, rigor, and real-world relevance.

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Build Enterprise-Grade PKI Skills from the Ground Up

Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) sits at the heart of modern security: SSL/TLS, code signing, device identity, zero trust, and secure access all rely on it. Yet PKI often feels opaque, fragile, and hard to get right.

This hands-on course takes you from practical cryptography basics to designing, deploying, and operating a two-tier enterprise PKI with HSM-backed keys, SSL/TLS, and OCSP/CRL-based revocation.

Whether you’re a security engineer, infrastructure/DevOps engineer, or PKI specialist in the making, you’ll gain the skills to build and run a reliable PKI that your organization can trust.

What This Course Covers

We start with the foundations and quickly move into real-world implementation:

– Core Cryptography Concepts – symmetric vs asymmetric crypto, hashing, digital signatures, key lifecycles
– Certificates & Trust – X.509, certificate chains, key usage, SAN, policies, and common pitfalls
– PKI Design – two-tier architectures, root vs issuing CAs, offline models, governance and policy
– HSM Integration – why HSMs matter, key protection, and integrating HSMs into your CA and key management flows
– SSL/TLS in Practice – issuing and managing server certificates for web, APIs, and internal services
– Revocation Mechanisms – OCSP, CRL, stapling, and designing a resilient revocation strategy

Key Benefits

By the end, you’ll be able to:

– Design a secure, two-tier enterprise PKI that fits your organization’s risk model
– Deploy and configure CAs, certificate templates, and policies using best practices
– Integrate HSMs to protect CA keys and sensitive private keys
– Issue and manage SSL/TLS certificates for on-prem and cloud workloads
– Implement OCSP and CRL to deliver reliable revocation and status checking
– Troubleshoot PKI issues that impact authentication, TLS, and secure communications

Real-World Applications

The skills you gain map directly to common enterprise use cases:

– Hardening internal and external HTTPS/TLS for web apps, APIs, and services
– Implementing device identity for endpoints, servers, and IoT
– Supporting zero trust and mutual TLS between services
– Improving compliance and auditability with strong key management and revocation
– Collaborating with security, ops, and development teams to deploy PKI-backed solutions

This course is designed to be practical, vendor-agnostic, and implementation-focused, giving you repeatable patterns you can adapt to Windows, Linux, and hybrid/cloud environments.

If you want to move from “PKI is scary” to “PKI is one of my core strengths,” this course is for you.