Certificates and Certification Authorities

A certificate is a packet of data that contains a user's public key in addition to the data that serves to identify the user in the real world (for example, the user's name). Every certificate is created and signed by a trusted application known as a certification authority.

Because certificates are signed, they can be transmitted over a nonsecure network or stored on nonsecure media. Each time you receive a certificate, you should verify the signature using the certification authority's public key.

Certain details relating to certificates are beyond the scope of CryptoAPI. These include:

• The actual binary format of certificates is not specified by CryptoAPI, although ISO X.509 is recommended.

• The manner in which each client communicates his or her name and public keys to the certification authority is not specified.

• The manner in which the certification authority's public key is distributed is not specified.

Warning If you use the Microsoft RSA Base Provider to create a certification authority, your license to issue certificates is limited to certificates intended for use in the context of your particular application or service.

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