What is a Certificate Authority?
A certificate authority (CA) is an authority in a network that issues and manages security credentials and public keys for message encryption and decryption. A CA will require, and authenticate, documents to verify the identity of a person or organization before issuing a digital certificate. A hierarchy of certificate authorities can exist for different purposes under a public key infrastructure (PKI). Depending on the PKI implementation, the certificate includes the owner’s public key, the expiration date of the certificate, the owner’s name, and other information about the public key owner. The schema for certificate authorities is quite complex and has some way to go before it is easy to apply for Internet users, but it will be essential for full-scale electronic commerce to evolve.
