VeriSign’s Description of Certificate Revocation II
When verifying a signature, you can check the relevant CRL to make sure the signer's key has not been revoked if the signed document is important enough to justify the time it takes to perform this check.
Certification Authorities (CAs) maintained CRLs and provide information about revoked keys originally certified by the CA.
- CRLs only list current keys, since expired keys should not be accepted in any case; when a revoked key is past its original expiration date it is removed from the CRL.
- Although CRLs are maintained in a distributed manner, there may be central repositories for CRLs, that is, sites on networks containing the latest CRLs from many organizations.
- An institution like a bank might want an in-house CRL repository to make CRL searches feasible on every transaction.