Digital Certificates
If you've ever set up a Web server that supports encrypted HTTP connections, you've probably had to obtain a digital certificate from a company such as Verisign. Digital certificates solve an important key-exchange problem: How can you be sure that someone's public key is what they say it is? To thwart possible man-in-the-middle attacks, you should have some piece of information at hand that you don't get from the network. In other words, if the only thing you know is what the network tells you, how do you know that the network is telling you the right things?
A digital certificate is just a digitally signed public key. A Web browser comes with some built-in knowledge about various certificate authorities, one of which is ...
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