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Certificates are essential for using asymmetric public-private keys
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RSA set up VeriSign company which offers web certificates for individuals, servers and software publishers
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There are many other authorities
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See http://digitalid.verisign.com/info_ctr.htm for a good description of certificates both in general and for Verisign services (http://www.verisign.com)
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Individual certificates are for use in Web browsers and for secure web mail(S/MIME) such as that offered by Netscape
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There is no agreed format for certificates but X.509 v3 certificate is common (PEM extends this)
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