Certification Authorities
A Certification Authority (CA) is an independent and trusted third party
that issues digital certificates to provide you with an assurance that the
public key of an entity truly belongs to that entity. The roles of a CA are:
- On receiving a request for a digital certificate, to verify the identity
of the requestor before building, signing and returning the personal certificate
- To provide the CA's own public key in its CA certificate
- To publish lists of certificates that are no longer trusted in a Certificate
Revocation List (CRL). For more information, refer to Working with Certificate Revocation Lists and Authority Revocation
Lists