Chapter 5. Requesting and Retrieving Certificates

IN THIS CHAPTER

  • Digital Certificates Explained

  • Acquiring Certificates

  • Building a Certificate Request Utility

As you learned in the preceding chapter, public/private key encryption is a simple matter of exchanging public keys and using these keys to encrypt data that only the recipient can decrypt. In practice, this process is fairly straightforward. But how do you know that the public key you received is really from the person you think it is from? What if it was really some else's public key—someone you didn't want to receive the encrypted data? Not having some way of verifying the person a public key belongs to is a real problem.

Digital certificates were created to solve this problem with ...

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