PKI made its first appearance in 1990s to administer and manage encryption keys through digital certificates. These digital certificates confirm the identity of people, devices or applications that own private keys and corresponding public keys. This ensures that people who are sending information through encryption gain required confidence that desired recipients of such information are actually the ones who will receive and read it.

Anyone else who is not the intended recipient, will not have the ability to intercept and interpret such information. PKI assigns identities to keys so that senders and receivers of information can accurately verify one another. Verisign, Gemalto, GlobalSign, WISekey, ENIGMA and eMudhra are leading PKI providers in the world.