What are Digital Certificates and Public Keys?
A digital certificate is a special kind of machine-readable document issued by a trusted Certificate Authority (CA) to an individual or organization which is unique to them. It is kept secret and access to it is usually protected by a password. There is a public part of the certificate which is included with your digital signature (see below). In order for someone to send you something encrypted so that only you can read it they require their own digital certificate and the public part of your certificate. An easier way to use digital signatures and encryption is to generate your own key pair. This is like a digital certificate but you do not need a CA to give it to you, you can create it yourself (see below).
