What is a Certificate Authority?
A digital certificate is issued by a special service called a Certificate Authority (CA). There are many commercial CA’s whose verification information comes pre-installed on many personal computers and browsers. This permits the secure use of Web sites that use certificates issued by those authorities.
A Certificate Authority (CA) is a trusted third party that issues digital certificates, mainly to online businesses. The Certificate Authority vouches for the identification of the business as an assurance to anyone exchanging personal information such as name, address, credit card, bank records or medical records. All such information is traded in encrypted form between the two parties, with the digital certificate acting as a positive ID of trust to the public. Since it is easy for any thief with a modicum of skills to create a website and impersonate a legitimate business for the purpose of stealing personal information from visitors, digital certificates have become a necessity. The Certificate Authority requires information from the applying business such as name, address, phone, physical data such as faxed records, and the business’s public encryption key, used to encrypt all sensitive data it collects from its customers. Other records and personal interviews might also be requir
Certificate Authority or Certification Authority (CA) is an entity, which is core to many PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) schemes, whose purpose is to issue digital certificates to use by other parties. It exemplifies a trusted third party. Some certification authorities may charge a fee for their service while some other CAs are free. It is also not uncommon for government and institutions to have their own CAs.
A certificate authority (CA) is a third-party organization that verifies the information or identity of computers on a network, and issues digital certificates of authenticity. Certificate authorities usually have some kind of agreement with a financial institution that provides the information used to confirm an individual’s identity. Digital certificates are used in a network security system to guarantee that the two parties exchanging information are really who they claim to be. Depending on how a network’s security system is configured, the certificate can include its owner’s public key and name, the expiration date of the certificate, or other information. There are many certificate authorities on the Internet, though VeriSign is the best-known example. At Indiana University, the IU Certificate Authority offers SSL certificates to the IU community. For more, see At IU, how do I obtain an SSL certificate for my web server? For a general discussion of web security, see the World Wid
