Certificate

Certificate - A certificate, in the PKI sense, is an electronic record that contains information about the person, organization or device that owns it and about the authority that issued it.   Its main use is to certify the owner/controller of a public key.   All public keys have certificate information attached to them.   The sort of information a certificate can contain is an e-mail address, an identifier of the controller (maybe their name, home or work address), information about the cryptography being used, how long the certificate is valid for and the source of any information if the certificate is cancelled. Certificates may be issued by their owners (self-signed), the organization they belong to, or they may be issued by other organizations.   See also trusted authorities.

[Category=Data Security ]

Source: Arctic Soft, 05 August 2011 09:36:36, http://www.articsoft.com/it_security.htm