It is used by secure web servers for shopping malls, telebanking and things like that. SSLeay is a free implementation of the SSL protocol. The current version while these lines are written is 0.9.0. The author of SSLeay is now an employee of a big cryptography company and is therefore not allowed to continue the maintainance of SSLeay. However, the copyright of the original library allows other people to continue the effort.
Encryption is plagued by legal problems of all kinds.
The subject of this confirmation depends on the CA's policy. Company-wide CAs might attest that you are an employee of the company, that you have permissions to use a server or whatever. If this certificate should be verified, the verifier must have a table of the names and public keys of trusted CAs. The following documentation has been written for SSLeay. The general cryptography utility has been renamed from 'ssleay' to 'openssl' and the installation does not install a bunch of symbolic links to this utility under the names 'genrsa', 'gendsa', etc.