Digital Certificate


Digital Certificate is an electronic document used to ’bind’ the identity of a natural or legal person to a public key. The certificate includes information about the key, information about its owner’s identity, and the digital signature of an entity that vouches for the correctness of the certificate’s contents. If the signature of the certificate issuer is valid, and the person examining the certificate trusts the creator of that signature, then they know they can use that key to communicate with the holder of the certificate. In a typical public-key infrastructure (PKI) scheme, the signer is a certificate authority (CA), usually a company that charges customers to issue certificates for them.

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