Glossary of Certificate Authority Authentication Terms
Some terms commonly used when discussing Certificate Authority (CA) Authentication:
| Chain of Trust |
A certificate hierarchy that enables you to verify the validity of a certificate issuer |
| CRL |
Certificate Revocation List. A list of digital certificates that have been revoked by the issuing Certificate Authority (CA) before their scheduled expiration date and should no longer be trusted. |
| CSR |
Certificate Signing Request. The request you submit to a certificate authority to procure a certificate. |
| Intermediary Certificate |
A subordinate certificate issued by the root certificate authority to issue end-entity server certificates. This results in a certificate chain that begins with the trusted root CA through to the SSL certificate issued to the end user. |
| OCSP |
Online Certificate Status Protocol. A network protocol, described in RFC 2560 , that is used to determine certificate status. |
| .PEM |
The .PEM extension is used for different types of X.509v3 files which contain ASCII (Base64 encoded) data. |
| Root Certificate |
A public key certificate that identifies a root Certificate Authority such as Comodo, DigiCert, or GlobalSign. |
