Digital Certificates
Now you have an overview of public-key crypto systems and how they can help provide somekey features in your overall security architecture. This brings us to a discussion of certificates. Certificates are a way of making public-key cryptography easier to use in a large-scale environment, such as an enterprise network or even the Internet.
What Is a Certificate?
A certificate is a file containing information about an entity that is signed by a certificate authority. The types of information necessary in a digital certificate are an entity's name, the public key, and the cryptographic algorithm for that key. Certificates are important because they bind a public key to the requesting entity.
Certificates are useful because they ...
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