Public Key Cryptography

Cryptography describes the techniques related to the following aspects of information security:

• Privacy or confidentiality

• Integrity of data

• Authentication

• Nonrepudiation or nonrepudiation of origin—Nonrepudiation of origin means that signers cannot claim that they did not sign a message while claiming that their private key remains secret. In some nonrepudiation schemes used in digital signatures, a timestamp is attached to the digital signature, so that even if the private key is exposed, the signature remains valid. Public and private keys are described in the following text.

In practice, cryptographic methods protect the data transferred from one system to another over public networks by encrypting the data using an encryption key. Public key cryptography (PKC), which is used on Juniper Networks EX Series Ethernet Switches, uses a pair of encryption keys: a public key and a private key. The public and private keys are created simultaneously using the same encryption algorithm. The private key is held by a user secretly and the public key is published. Data encrypted with a public key can be decrypted only with the corresponding private key and vice versa. When you generate a public/private key pair, the switch automatically saves the key pair in a file in the certificate store, from which it is subsequently used in certificate request commands. The generated key pair is saved as certificate-id.priv.

Note:

The default RSA and DSA key size is 1024 bits. If you are using the Simple Certificate Enrollment Protocol (SCEP), Juniper Networks Junos operating system (Junos OS) supports RSA only.

To configure, monitor, and manage the public key infrastructure (PKI) on Juniper Networks devices, see Public Key Infrastructure User Guide.