Certificate Authority
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an organization trusted to issue Digital Certificates — connecting to an unknown website, you need a good way to trust it, so you trust a third party (the CA) who has digitally signed the site's certificate instead
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how trust works
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a certificate authority itself receives its authority from another, higher certificate authority — see Chain of Trust
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maintains records of issued certificates and provides lookup services (see Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP), Certificate Revocation List (CRL)) so others can verify a certificate's legitimacy
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types
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Third-Party Certificate Authority — a public CA, built into browsers by default
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Private Certificate Authority — an organization's own internal CA
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distinguish from
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Self-Signed Certificate — where an organization acts as its own certificate authority, rather than using a trusted third party
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Linked references 13
- Certificate Revocation List (CRL)
- Certificate Signing Request (CSR)
- Chain of Trust
- comptia-security-plus-701-coursera
- comptia-security-plus-701-professormesser
- Digital Certificate
- OCSP Stapling
- Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP)
- Private Certificate Authority
- Public Key Infrastructure (PKI)
- Root of Trust
- Self-Signed Certificate
- Third-Party Certificate Authority