certificate authority

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.

Read more about certificate authority: - The U.S. Government Accounting Office has a presentation, "Advances and Remaining Challenges to Adoption of Public Key Infrastructure Technology." - VeriSign is the leading certificate authority, providing over 125,000 Web sites with SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) server certificates, mainly for use in e-commerce. - SearchSecurity.com provides links to resources for "Securing the Internet and E-Commerce."

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