Public Key Certificate

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. In cryptography, a public key certificate (also known as a digital certificate or identity certificate) is an electronic document which uses a digital signature to bind together a public key with an identity - information such as the name of a person or an organization, their address, and so forth. The certificate can be used to verify that a public key belongs to an individual. In a typical public key infrastructure (PKI) scheme, the signature will be of a certificate authority (CA). In a web of trust scheme, the signature is of either the user (a self-signed certificate) or other users ("endorsements"). In either case, the signatures on a certificate are attestations by the certificate signer that the identity information and the public key belong together.