PKI, Certificates, and What Breaks When Trust Fails

Episode 22   Published January 20, 2026 18 minute watch

Summary

A misconfigured PKI lets a low-level compromised account request a certificate as an admin or even the CEO. That certificate is then assumed valid wherever it appears. Mark Cooper, CEO and founder of PKI Solutions, spent a decade at Microsoft on public key infrastructure before founding his company. PKI underpins passwordless authentication, TLS, IoT, and endpoint identity, yet it rarely enters the security conversation. With host Jason Kikta, now CTO at Automox, Cooper maps the PKI risk spectrum from certificate expiration to high-end compromise. He also questions the assumption that having a backup is the same as being resilient.