Public key infrastructures are designed to provision public key certificates to devices and applications. PKIs provide verifiable roots of trust in our internet-connected world and can conform to a wide variety of architectures. Some PKIs may have very deep trust chains, with many levels between an end entity (such as an IoT device) and the top-most level root of trust (the root certificate authority). Others may have shallow trust chains in which there is only the one CA at the top and a single level of end entity devices underneath it. But how do they work?
Supposing an IoT device needs a cryptographically strong identity, it wouldn't make sense for it to provision itself with that identity because there is nothing inherently ...
