Internet Security ABC - The Digital Certificate - What's It Mean and Why is It Important?

The Digital Certificate - What's It Mean and Why 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 all it's 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.

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