Conclusion
The combination of web browsers that can understand and authenticate digital certificates, companies like VeriSign and Thawte Consulting that are willing to issue those certificates, and the incorporation of CA certificates for these companies embedded in the web browsers has done a remarkable job of bootstrapping an international public key infrastructure in a remarkably short period of time. To date, the main purpose of this infrastructure has been the identifying of corporations, which is a considerably easier job than identifying individuals. (For one thing, corporations are willing to pay more money for identification services than individuals are.) In the next chapter we’ll look at individual identification.
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