Cryptography: Learn Public Key Infrastructure from Scratch

Course Overview

Updated in May 2025. This course now features Coursera Coach! A smarter way to learn with interactive, real-time conversations that help you test your knowledge, challenge assumptions, and deepen your understanding as you progress through the course. This video course explains how Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) works on websites and the importance of digital certificates in securing communication between clients and web servers. You'll learn to deploy and manage a two-tier PKI on Windows Servers, supporting applications requiring certificate-based security. Starting with an introduction to PKI and digital certificates, the course covers cryptographic methods used for online data security. You'll explore certification authorities (CA), certificate requests, and services, and configure Network Device Enrollment Service (NDES), Certificate Enrollment Service (CES), and Certificate Enrollment Policy (CEP). A bonus topic includes migrating hashing algorithms from SHA1 to SHA2 on Windows Server 2016. By the end, you'll be proficient in deploying and configuring PKI on Windows Servers. Key learnings include - Managing a two-tier PKI on Windows Server 2012 R2 - Understanding encryption and decryption - Using SSL certificates for website security - Configuring CDP/CIA extensions and OCSP servers This course is ideal for candidates with basic knowledge of Windows Servers and networking, IT professionals wanting to learn about Active Directory Certificate Services (ADCS) on Windows infrastructure, and those in cybersecurity or identity and access management.