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  3. Administration: Security - Certificates
  4. Glossary of Certificate Authority Authentication Terms

Glossary of Certificate Authority Authentication Terms

Some terms commonly used when discussing Certificate Authority (CA) Authentication:

Term Definition
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  A list of digital certificates that have been revoked by the issuing Certificate Authority (CA) before their scheduled expiration date and should no longer be trusted.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.