November 1999
Intermediate to advanced
320 pages
8h 46m
English
As indicated in the "Certificate Structure and Semantics" section earlier, a number of policy-related extensions may be present in a given certificate. The policy-related extensions are extremely important in the sense that they help to govern the acceptable use of the certificate in terms of policy compliance—potentially across multiple PKI domains.
The policy-related extensions refer either directly or indirectly to a certificate policy. The X.509 Recommendation [X.509] defines a certificate policy as
A named set of rules that indicates the applicability of a certificate to a particular community and/or class of application with common security requirements. For example, a particular certificate policy might indicate applicability ...