What is digital certificate and what is the difference between digital certificate and digital signature?
Digital certificates are electronic documents or files employed to prove ownership of a given public key and the authenticity of entities through the use of cryptography and public key infrastructure (PKI). It provides communicating parties with the assurance that the entities they are communicating with are who they claim they are. Furthermore, it helps organizations ensure that only trusted entities can connect to their corporate networks. It contains the public key, unique information of the entity that possesses the public key, metadata of the certificate, and a digital signature of the public key the certificate authority (CA) or the PKI established.
Public key cryptography or asymmetric cryptography employs a public and private key pair between the communicating parties. Moreover, the private key is held secure by the owner and it is used to sign documents or decrypt messages depending on its application. And the digital certificate enables entities to exchange their public key so that it can be authenticated in signing or decrypting activities.
The popular web browsers and web servers use digital certificates to establish assurance that unauthorized entities have not tampered published contents and to exchange keys to encrypt and decrypt web content. This is typically maintained by third parties such as WebTrust.
The PKI system is responsible to distribute, authenticate and revoke digital certificates and establishes trusted relationship among communicating parties through consortium known as WebTrust.
The benefits of digital certificates include:
- Security
- Authenticity
- Reliability
- Public trust
- Reliability
- Scalability