Apache: The Definitive Guide, 3rd Edition

Certificates

“No man is an island,” John Donne reminds us. We do not practice cryptography on our own: there would be little point. Even in the simple situation of the spy and his spymaster, it is important to be sure you are actually talking to the correct person. Many counter-intelligence operations depend on capturing the spy and replacing him at the encrypting station with one of their own people to feed the enemy with twaddle. This can be annoying and dangerous for the spymaster, so he often teaches his spies little tricks that he hopes the captors will overlook and so betray themselves.^[4]

In the larger cryptographic world of the Web, the problem is as acute. When we order a pack of cards from www.butterthlies.com, we want to be sure the company accepting our money really is that celebrated card publisher and not some interloper; similarly, Butterthlies, Inc., wants to be sure that we are who we say we are and that we have some sort of credit account that will pay for their splendid offerings. The problems are solved to some extent by the idea of a certificate. A certificate is an electronic document signed (i.e., having a secure hash of it encrypted using a private key, which can therefore be checked with the public key) by some respectable person or company called a certification authority (CA). It contains the holder’s public key plus information about her: name, email address, company, and so on (see Chapter 11, later in this chapter). You get this document by filling ...