Digital certificates and key management
Concept of digital certificate

Digital certificate is an electronic document which incorporates 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. A digital certificate is a data structure which contains the public key of a subject or certificate holder, as well as the identification data of the certificate holder, a time stamp related to the certificate validity and other data from the certification authority. This structure is signed with the private key of a certification authority (CA) and every user is able to check the authenticity of the certificate content by using the public key of the certification authority.

The next figure shows the structure of a digital certificate:

Fig. 13 – Digital certificate structure