Web browsers are shipped with a list of trusted CAs. Renewal of key pairs and certificates Support for trust relationships with other certificate authorities Certificates may be used to establish the identity of an individual, or of a computer. The UW is currently using certificates for central Web servers so that they can establish secure communication links with Web clients. How client, or personal, certificates will fit into the university's future security infrastructure remains to be seen. While there are a small number of Web servers, and therefore a modest certificate management task for them, deployment of personal certificates for everyone at the UW would be a much bigger challenge, with lots of new policy questions.
Secure messaging is the principal driver for using personal certificates.
Other alternatives can be used to address security problems in online systems, including Web-based transaction systems. However, the technical, policy, and management issues mentioned previously must be resolved before any widescale deployment of a public-key infrastructure is reasonable. Digital Signatures Digital signatures provide a way to protect the integrity of a digital document and to verify who signed it. Protecting a document's integrity is done by giving the recipient a way to determine whether or not the document has been modified since it was digitally signed. To allow a document's integrity to be verified, a mathematical function is applied to the bits that make up the digital document.