How does certificate chain work

The last certificate in the list is a trust anchor : a certificate that you trust because it was delivered to you by some trustworthy procedure. A trust anchor is a CA certificate or more precisely, the public verification key of a CA used by a relying party as the starting point for path validation. A root certificate is a digital certificate that belongs to the issuing Certificate Authority. Intermediate Certificate. Intermediate certificates branch off root certificates like branches of trees.

They act as middle-men between the protected root certificates and the server certificates issued out to the public. There will always be at least one intermediate certificate in a chain, but there can be more than one. Server Certificate. The server certificate is the one issued to the specific domain the user is needing coverage for. How do Certificate Chains work?

How are Certificate Chains built? Source At the most basic level, a candidate certification path must "name chain" between the recognized trust anchor and the target certificate i. Source One last topic. If not, your TLS certificate will not be trusted by browsers.

This would also be an issue if you self-signed your certificate. Did you install your intermediate certificates properly? Make sure that you successfully install all intermediate certificates at the time you install your TLS certificate. Is your server configured correctly? Like this blog? We think you will love this. Subscribe to our Weekly Blog Updates!

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An illustration of the certificate chain in the form of a tree. About the author Megha Thakkar Megha can usually be found reading, writing, or watching documentaries, guaranteed to bore her family.

You might also like. When you install your end-user certificate for example. The root certificate is usually embedded in your connected device. In the case of web browsers, root certificates are packaged with the browser software. The procedure to install the Intermediate SSL certificates depends on the web server and the environment where you install the certificate.

We provide a certificate installation wizard which contains installation instructions for several servers and platforms. If you purchase a certificate with us you can use this wizard to obtain and install the files you need for your server. That means you create a gap between a specific end-user or intermediate certificate and its issuer.