If you decide to go to trip and you haven’t car, maybe you rent one but what ensure the company that you will return it back? Does it Word of Honor? Of course no. It's your identity that’s assured that you are a citizen and the company Rights are guaranteed. Digital certificate do the same as your identity and serves the same purpose as a driver’s license or a passport but at the Cyber World.
A Digital Certificate (DC) is a digital file that certifies the identity of an individual or institution who claims that they are the message sender. It allows the recipient to reply to the message in a secure way, so that only the sender of the original message and nobody else receives it. (digitalid.verisign.com,1998)
The digital certificate issue by a Certification Authority (CA) which is a trusted authority that issues a certificate that validates the identity of those to whom it issue certificates with a given public key that's accessible to everyone used for encrypting messages and the private key that sent to the consumer through Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), a protocol used to secure transactions. Every party in a communication trust this authority.(digitalid.verisign.com,1998)
A digital certificate contains an entity's name, address, serial number, public key, expiration date, name of certificate authority and the digital signature of the certificate-issuing authority so that a recipient can verify that the certificate is real. (Cryptography and network security, 2002)
If you try to issuance a digital certificate at the begging you must generate two pair of keys public and private key then you must send the public key to trust certificate authority that will verify from your identity before it sings your certificate and issues it to the public, the recipient will use your certificate to demonstrate legitimacy of your public key, after that you can send a message in a secure way , you have to encryption your message by using your private key but the recipient will read your message by decryption it using the sender public key , by contrast if the recipient want to reply on a sender message he will use now the public key of the recipient to encryption the message ,when the message arrive to the Recipient he will read the message by using his private key to decryption it , this allow the information to moving in a secure way between the sender & the recipient.(cryptography and network security,2002)
Digital certificate used to prove the claims of people, websites and network resources about there real identity, and to provide protection for the data exchanged between the sender and the receiver , despite of the benefits of digital certificate it have some weakness point like the cost of subscription to issuing the digital certificates from the certificates authority ,also if the owner walks away from his computer, others can gain access to it and use his digital certificate to execute unauthorized business.(e- business & e- commerce how to programme,2001)
Digital Certificate emerged to ensure the safety of sending & receiving information on the internet because of the increasing in the hackers dangerous activities that threatens the confidential and personal information for many parties on the internet.
References
(digitalid.verisign.com, 1998) Available from:
https://digitalid.verisign.com/client/help/id_intro.htm, [April 7, 2011]
(e- business & e- commerce how to programme, 2001) Available from:
Deitel, H.M., Deitel, P.J. & Nieto, T. (2001), e- business & e- commerce how to programme. Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, N.J, [April 7, 2011].
(Cryptography and network security, 2002) Available from:
Stallings, S., & (2002), cryptography and network security, 2nd edn, prentice hall, Sydney, [April 7, 2011].
