August 2000
Intermediate to advanced
800 pages
21h 5m
English
Content preview from Microsoft® Windows® 2000 Security HandbookBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Digital Certificates
All right, now you're an expert on PKI and CAs, or at least you know more about them than you did. If you have spent any time working with security and the Internet, you've undoubtedly noticed people spend a lot of time talking about digital certificates. How exactly do digital certificates tie into PKIs and public-key cryptography? Surprise! A digital certificate is just a public key packaged for use as part of a PKI. Digital Certificates are used to provide an easy distribution method for public-key cryptography public keys.
Note
One thing that is important to understand is that only the public key is packaged as a digital certificate. If you think about it, it makes sense. The private key is one that in theory only you ...