certificate authority (CA)
(CA also stands for conditional
access, a term used in DTV.)
A certificate authority (CA) is an authority in a network that issues and manages security
credentials and public keys
for message encryption.
As part of a public key infrastructure (PKI), a CA
checks with a registration authority (RA) to
verify information provided by the requestor of a digital
certificate. If the RA verifies the requestor's information, the CA can then issue a
certificate.
Depending on the public key infrastructure implementation, the certificate includes the owner's
public key, the expiration date of the certificate, the owner's name, and other information about
the public key owner.
This was last updated in June 2007
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