Using Digital Certificates with Your Application

The choice of digital certificates, or Digital IDs, used in your application matters a great deal. A digital certificate is nothing more than a bag o'bytes. It has no intrinsic meaning. To use a credit card analogy, a digital certificate is the equivalent of a magnetic stripe card. The magnetic stripe card is meaningful only if it can be used for something useful. It's more useful if is says VISA on it than if it says San Jose Public Library or Joe's Office.

Digital IDs generally fall into three classes:

  • Digital IDs issued by corporate certificate servers

  • Digital IDs issued by public Certification Authorities (such as Verisign, Thawte, CyberTrust, and so on)

  • Digital IDs issued by public Authentication ...

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