The root CA or trust anchor has the ability to sign and issue intermediate certificates. Intermediate certificates (also known as intermediate, subordinate, or issuing CAs) provide a flexible structure for conferring the validity of the trust anchor to additional intermediate and end-entity certificates in the chain. In this sense, intermediate certificates serve an administrative function; each intermediate can be used for a specific purpose — such as issuing SSL/TLS or code signing certificates — and can even be used to confer the root CA’s trust to other organizations. Intermediate certificates also provide a buffer between the end-entity certificate and the root CA, protecting the private root key from compromise. For publicly trusted CAs (including SSL.com), the CA/Browser forum’s Baseline Requirements actually prohibit issuing end-entity certificates directly from the root CA, which must be kept securely offline. This means that any publicly trusted certificate’s chain of trust will include at least one intermediate certificate. In the example shown below, SSL.com EV SSL Intermediate CA RSA R3 is the sole intermediate certificate in the SSL.com website's chain of trust. As the certificate's name suggests, it is only used for issuing EV SSL/TLS certificates: