1 | Certificates are essential for using asymmetric public-private keys |
2 | RSA set up VeriSign company which offers web certificates for individuals, servers and software publishers |
3 | There are many other authorities |
4 | 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) |
5 | Individual certificates are for use in Web browsers and for secure web mail(S/MIME) such as that offered by Netscape |
6 | There is no agreed format for certificates but X.509 v3 certificate is common (PEM extends this) |