Privacy

  • Article

Applies To: Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Server 2003 with SP1, Windows Server 2003 with SP2

Privacy

Communications on a network, such as the Internet, are subject to possible monitoring by unknown and, perhaps, malicious users. Public networks are treacherous for unencrypted sensitive information because anyone can access the network and analyze the data being transmitted between two points. Even private local area networks (LANs) are vulnerable to determined efforts by intruders to acquire physical access to the network. Consequently, if sensitive information is transmitted between computing devices on any type of network, users will almost certainly want to use some sort of encryption to keep their data private.

Public key encryption is not used to encrypt large amounts of data. Instead, data is typically protected with secret key encryption and, in turn, that secret key is encrypted with the public key of the recipient of the data. The encrypted secret key will then be transmitted to the recipient along with encrypted data itself. The recipient will use the private key to decrypt the secret key. The secret key will then be used to decrypt the message itself.

Certificates enable privacy of transmitted data using a number of different methods. Some of the commonly used privacy-enabling protocols that use certificates are:

  • Secure Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (S/MIME)

  • Transport Layer Security (TLS)

  • Internet Protocol security (IPSec). For more information, see Introducing IPSec.

For more information about privacy and certificates, see Certificates Resources.