How Certificate Authorities Work
Certificate Authorities (CA) are fairly straightforward server applications that basically take in certificate requests, reformat and sign them, and then make the resulting certificate available for retrieval by the requester. The function of a CA is actually a bit more involved than just that; otherwise it would be easy for people to set themselves up as their own CA. The biggest requirement that a CA needs to meet is one of trust. People and applications that receive a certificate issued by a particular CA need to be able to trust that the CA verified that the owner of the certificate is who he or she claims to be. They also need to trust that the CA is who it claims to be.
Certificate Authority Hierarchies ...
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