On Mon, 8 May 2000, Juan Miguel Cacho wrote:
> Can anyone explain to me, in layman's terms what a certificate is and what
> is it used for, and what can you do with it? I have a vague idea, i need
> more details.
A certificate is someone's public key, digitally signed by an entity like
Verisign (a Certificate Authority) that attests that the public key really
belongs to this someone. A "server certificate" is the certificate
of a webserver (say Apache httpd) that it supplies to a webclient, say
Netscape, so that both client and server can encrypt the data they send to
each other using the same public key (the webserver's public key)(more
accurately using the same session key, but that does not matter here).
The effect is, if a third party is listening on the line, he can only
listen to encrypted data which will be difficult for him to decrypt. This
is the way you protect data that you send to web sites: data like credit
card numbers, or Swiss bank account numbers. This is also the way that
www.bpiexpressonline.com "secures" your web transaction, using secure
https instead of nonsecure http.
The concept of "Public Key Cryptography" is explained in better detail
in the document "An introduction to cryptography" which you can download
from any PGP site, say http://www.pgpi.org/doc/pgpintro/.
//PMana
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