What is a digital certificate?
A digital certificate is an electronic ‘credit card’ that establishes your credentials when doing business or other transactions on the Web. The certificate is issued by a certification authority (CA). It contains your name, a serial number, expiration dates, a copy of the certificate holder’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. Digital certificates can be kept in registries so that authenticating users can look up other users’ public keys.
Digital certificates provide the basis for secure electronic transactions as they enable all participants in a transaction to quickly and easily verify the identity of the other participants. They are digitally signed and issued by a Certificate Authority (CA) which verifies that the public key attached to the certificate belongs to the party stated. WebIntellects uses Comodo for its CA.
