What is an Intermediate Certificate Authority (CA) and why do I need one?
An Intermediate CA is an authority that you use to create your own SSL certificates in a PKI environment. An Intermediate CA depends on a Root CA that is the origin of the chain of trust. The idea is that if your Intermediate CA gets compromised or you decide to revocate all the certificates issued by it, you can still use your Root CA without further inconvenience for your users (the users only need to have installed the certificate of the Root CA in their browsers). As for the second question, the sort answer is that chances are that you really do not need one 🙂 but for the shake of the experiment lets get our hands dirty! First of all, I need to clarify that my interest in this topic was also risen by the fact that Verisign has switched to a two-tier hierarchy of Certificate Authorities, and this has some implications specially in the configuration of web server software: “As of April 2006, all SSL certificates issued by VeriSign require the installation of an Intermediate CA Certi
