X.509 - Certificates

Certificates

In the X.509 system, a certification authority issues a certificate binding a public key to a particular distinguished name in the X.500 tradition, or to an alternative name such as an e-mail address or a DNS-entry.

An organization's trusted root certificates can be distributed to all employees so that they can use the company PKI system. Browsers such as Internet Explorer, Netscape/Mozilla, Opera, Safari and Chrome come with a predetermined set of root certificates pre-installed, so SSL certificates from larger vendors will work instantly; in effect the browsers' developers determine which CAs are trusted third parties for the browsers' users.

X.509 also includes standards for certificate revocation list (CRL) implementations, an often neglected aspect of PKI systems. The IETF-approved way of checking a certificate's validity is the Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP). Firefox 3 enables OCSP checking by default along with versions of Windows including Vista and later.

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