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The chain of trust is now: your certificate … the RCA’s intermediate certificate … the RCA’s root certificate. Once they are satisfied, then they will issue you a certificate signed by one of their intermediate certificates. For example, if you are a company requesting a certificate for your web server, the RCA should run domain checks, and company registration checks, along with other checks in order to validate that your are who you claim to be. The RCA will typically validate your request. The application process is typically called a CERTIFICATE SIGNING REQUEST (CSR). This signing establishes a CHAIN OF TRUST, it “proves” that the intermediate certificate is trusted by the root certificate.Ĭommercially, any company or end user can request their own certificate(s) by applying to one of the RCAs. The pyramid starts to build because the intermediate certificates are SIGNED by the root certificate. These RCAs will have a root certificate and typically a number of INTERMEDIATE certificates. You may have heard of some of these companies (such as Verisign, DigiCert, and many others…). These RCAs are “trusted” companies who own a ROOT CERTIFICATE. At the apex of the pyramid are a small number of Root Certificate Authorities (RCAs). This introduces the concept of a hierarchy of certificate signing.Ĭertificate signing can be visualised as a “pyramid of trust”. The unwritten assumption here is that the consumer(s) all have a copy of that public key, or that any given certificate can be validated. The consumer will receive the encrypted data and will need the public key to decrypt it. The owner will use the private key to encrypt data before it is sent to the “consumer”. The “owner” of a certificate receives both parts.

Click to expand.I’ve got some time to kill, so here goes… This is probably going to be a massive oversimplification…Ĭertificates are used for a bunch of different purposes, but fundamentally they are used to perform security-by-encryption.Ĭertificates effectively are made up of two parts.

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