Signing Certificate
Definition
A certificate binding a public key to a subject for specified purposes under a trust policy. It does not independently establish human consent or document truth.
Related terms
- Asymmetric Cryptography
- A family of constructions using related public/private material for scheme-specific operations. Public-key authenticity still requires an appropriate trust mechanism.
- Digital Signature
- A scheme with key generation, signing and verification operations. It is not generally “encrypt the hash with a private key.”
- ECC
- Elliptic-curve-based constructions, including ECDSA and ECDH. Security depends on the curve, subgroup, parameters and implementation, not just a nominal bit count.
- Hash Function
- A deterministic digest function with specified security properties. A bare digest is neither encryption nor a secret-key authenticator.
- HMAC
- A keyed message-authentication construction using a hash. Validation depends on the actual key and algorithm; either shared-key holder may generate it.
- PKI
- Policies, roles and mechanisms for binding public keys to subjects and managing trust, certificates and status. Trust anchors depend on the application.
- RSA
- A mathematical family used by defined encryption and signature schemes. Textbook modular exponentiation alone is not a secure message scheme.
- Trapdoor Function
- A function intended to be hard to invert without specified secret information. Not every public-key construction is accurately described by the same...