Infineon Security Platform Solution

Digital Certificates

Digital certificates are electronic credentials that confirm the identity of an individual or a company.  A digital certificate essentially associates the identity of the digital certificate owner to a pair of electronic keys that can be used to sign digital information.

A digital certificate must contain the following information:

• Owner’s public key

• Owner’s name 

• Expiration date of the digital certificate 

• Serial number of the digital certificate 

• Name of the CA that issued the certificate

• Digital certificate of the CA that issued the digital certificate

Apart from this information, a digital certificate may also contain other information supplied by the user, such as:

• Postal address 

• E-mail address (for some applications this field is mandatory)

• Basic registration information (such as country, age, gender etc.)

Digital certificates are usually issued and managed by a trusted third party called a Certificate Authority (CA). The process of obtaining a certificate can be generalized for a large number of such CAs. There are quite a number of CAs that cater to the ever-increasing number of digital certificates by issuing certificates that can be used for purposes ranging from secure e-mail to secure communication over the internet or over an intranet.

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