What are Digital Certificates A digital certificate DC

What are Digital Certificates? A digital certificate (DC) is a digital file that certifies the identity of an individual or institution. It is issued by a Certification Authority (CA), and serves the same purpose as a driver’s license or a passport. Visit for more Learning Resources

What are Certification Authorities(CA)? 1. Certification Authorities are the digital world’s equivalent to passport offices. 1. They issue digital certificates and validate holders’ identity and authority. 1. They attach an individual or institution’s public key along with other identifying information into each digital certificate.

What are Registration Authorities(RA)? • 1. This component accepts a request for a certificate. • 2. it performs the necessary steps for registering and authenticating a person requesting a certificate. •

What is the Process of obtaining a certificate?

What Does a Digital Certificate Contain? It contains your name, a serial number, expiration date, a copy of the certificateholder's public key (used for encrypting messages and digital signatures), and the digital signature of the certificate-issuing authority so that a recipient can verify that the certificate is real. Some digital certificates conform to the X. 509 standard.

Example of a Certificate: Serial number (unique to issuer) info about certificate owner, including algorithm and key value itself (not shown) info about certificate issuer valid dates digital signature by issuer

What is the Process of obtaining a certificate? 1. User register for a digital certificate through a web form. 2. User may go to Registration Authority for requesting a certificate. 3. Once data is inserted into form. The browser initiates a key generation process(take random input). 4. These random values are inserted into cryptographic algorithm that used to generate public/private key Pair. 5. Once RA is done with his processing copy of the public key and other identifying information is sent to CA. 6. The CA generates Digital Certificate. 7. The new certificate is sent to the user.

Verification of Digital Certificate 1. The first step is finding out if the CA is a trusted CA. 2. If the CA name is found to be a trusted CA, half of the authentication process is complete. 3. If no trusted CA is found you will not be authenticated and the process ends here. 4. A message will then be sent back to you saying that your identity could not be validated.

5. The next step in the process is to validate the digital signature on your certificate. 6. To validate the digital signature person authenticating the certificate will take the message of the certificate and then uses the same hash algorithm which is used to encrypt the message. 7. If the two hashes match then the digital signature is valid and the certificate is authenticated. 8. If the two hashes do not match then the certificate has been changed since it was issued and the certificate cannot be authenticated.

9. The final steps to validating the certificate are looking at the expiration date and seeing that the certificate is valid. 10. Once a certificate is authenticated the identity of the owner of the certificate has been authenticated. For more detail contact us