What is the purpose of public key infrastructure?

The purpose of public key infrastructure (PKI) primarily revolves around ensuring the integrity and security of digital communications. PKI accomplishes this by providing a framework for creating, managing, distributing, and revoking digital certificates that are used in public key cryptography. These digital certificates help verify the identities of parties involved in a digital transaction, ensuring that communications are both secure and trustworthy.

When using PKI, public keys are distributed to allow secure information exchange, while keeping the private keys confidential. This setup helps in authenticating users and ensuring that the data sent between parties has not been altered during transmission, which contributes to the overall integrity and security of communication channels.

The other options do not accurately capture the full scope of what PKI is intended to do. Managing keys used in private-key encryption is not a function of PKI since it primarily deals with public key systems. Eliminating the need for encryption in web transactions misrepresents the role of PKI, as encryption remains a fundamental component of secure communication. Finally, while standardizing binary communications across different systems is important, it falls outside the specific goals of PKI, which focus more on security and authentication rather than data formats or protocols.