A digital certificate is an electronic "credit card"
that establishes your credentials when doing business or
other transactions on the Web. It is issued by a certification
authority (CA). It contains your name, a serial number,
expiration dates, a copy of the certificate holder's public
key (used for encrypting messages and digital signatures),
and the digital signature of the certificate-issuing authority
so that a recipient can verify that the certificate is real.
Some digital certificates conform to a standard, X.509.
Digital certificates can be kept in registries so that authenticating
users can look up other users' public keys.
|