Appendix B. X.509 Digital Certificates
X.509, one of the most common formats for signed certificates, is used largely by Sun Microsystems, Microsoft, VeriSign, IBM, and many other companies for signing e-mail messages, authenticating program code, and certifying many other types of data. In its simplest form, an X.509 certificate contains the following data:
The certificate format version—X.509 V1, V2, or V3.
The certificate serial number.
The identifier of the signature algorithm—the algorithm the CA used to sign the certificate. The identifier consists of the algorithm ID and the parameters passed to the algorithm.
The X.500 name of the signer of the certificate. This entity is normally a CA. Using this certificate implies trusting the entity that ...
Get Enterprise Java™ Security: Building Secure J2EE™ Applications now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
