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Internet Security
What
is a Digital Certificate? Is It Important?
What
is a digital certificate? What does it
mean to you and why is it so important? If you’re a consumer
and a World Wide Web traveler, then digital certificates are
something you need to know about. The digital certificate is
pushing far beyond the initiative and finding transformations
amidst various service providers with developing e-commerce
and many business to business operations. These digital
certificates are being used to authenticate consumers and to
secure all
transactions, data, and messages. The digital certificate is
used to implement electronic signatures. Not to mention keeping
the online community safe from hackers and those fraudulent
individuals seeking to steal information from the uneducated
internet consumer. One of the great benefits of digital certificates
is to allow carriers to add multiple layers of security and
make improvements on administration.
Digital
certificates have grown out of the Public Key Infrastructure
(PKI), that employs cryptography to authenticate
consumers and enable internet consumers to privately and securely
exchange
information. A digital certificate of authority is used under
PKI to maintain and distribute all private and public keys
that are used in conjunction with each other. For security
purposes there must be a combination of a private key and a
public key in order to authenticate a consumer, so a transaction
can be made. A PKI also provides for a digital certificate
that can identify any individual consumer or organization through
directory services that can store or revoke any digital certificates,
as the need may be. Most Web browsers have been the largest
PKI users so far and although many consumers are not aware
of it, they are using digital certificates every time they
open a browser at a secure website.
While the public key is made accessible to the consumers,
the private key is most often sent via e-mail to the consumers
through a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), a protocol used to secure
transactions. Once the private key is sent to the consumer,
it is then stored in a browser. When the digital certificate
authority acknowledges the public and private keys, only then
can the consumer have access to the information they desire.
The X509 is used to format the digital certificates and the
primary purpose of the digital certificate server is to represent
a reliable third party by attending to confirmation, authentication
and distribution of the public keys. The third party is called
the certificate authority.
VeriSign
has been the dominating company in the digital certificate
authority field, although there has been a growing amount of
companies that want to issue their own digital certificates.
Some of the companies following in VeruSign’s lead are Entrust
Technologies, GTE CyberTrust Solutions and Xcert, the latter
having produced WebSentry and SentryCA. Xcert has become a
popular choice among other service providers and are attempting
to become the next leading digital certificate authority.
Along with increasing security, digital
certificates have reduced the number of passwords a consumer needs to remember
in order to access other networks and domains. This one time
sign on approach has become very appealing for all those e-commerce
applications. Instead of enduring all those respective requests
for the consumers’ user name and password, the consumer can
easily gain access to all the desired networks and domains
for where they have rights.
Digital certificates also benefit consumers by creating
an electronic auditing trail that permits companies to be able
to track down who and what transactions were made and who had
accessed what area. Some companies use the electronic auditing
system to track their customers on their customer service sites
to help them understand what kinds of problems their consumers
are having. Another use for digital certificate authority in
auditing systems is fraud control.
Digital certificates have been used for many years on the
internet to securely identify individual consumers and businesses.
Although one constant challenge of issuing digital certificates
is positively confirming the certificate holders’ identity.
Digital certificates have become a standard at how they are
used and defined. This standardization also permits many financial
institutions to release digital certificates and become confident
that they will be accepted on multiple websites. Some financial
institutions are normally trusted, such as credit unions, who
have become excellent candidates for certificate authorities. # # # # #
SolveYourProblem.com : 2007
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