Digital Certificates Explained

Digital certificates are the packaging of someone's public key with other identifying information that is signed by a Certificate Authority. A Certificate Authority (CA) is a third party that vouches for the identity of the person claiming to be the owner of the public key.

For this system to work, both parties have to trust the Certificate Authority and trust that the Certificate Authority has taken the appropriate steps to verify the identity of the owner of the public key. One of the most well-known Certificate Authorities is VeriSign (http://www.verisign.com), but almost anyone can be set up as a Certificate Authority by using Microsoft's Certificate Server. It is starting to become very common for corporate ...

Get Developing Secure Applications with Visual Basic 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.