How can the trustworthiness of different certificates be assessed?
Trustworthiness of certificates To ensure the unequivocal assignment of a certificate to a person, the certificate must be issued and signed by a trustworthy organization or authority which, in turn, guarantees that the certificate does indeed belong to a particular person. When documents are exchanged within an organization, this can be done by the organization itself, as all staff can regard the company as being trustworthy. Microsoft Windows Server 2003 already provides a PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) for creating certificates. In the case of communication outside of an organization, only a superordinate certification authority is able to guarantee the trustworthiness of a certificate on the basis of its digital signature. For a certificate to be regarded as valid, one must therefore have confidence in the certification authority itself. For this reason, many certification authorities have already been classed as trustworthy in web browsers: Internet Explorer: Tools –> Internet o
