User A and B exchange public keys and use the other person’s public key to encrypt messages back to each other. Only User A has the Private Key that can decrypt any the messages encrypted with User A’s matching public key.

Digital certificates can be used to identify a person or a device. Once identification is established, the certificate is most frequently used to prove one person’s, or device’s, identity to another person or device. Because of the RSA system, they both know each other. The digital certificate can now be used for signing and/or encrypting email or for providing two-factor strong authentication.

Every time a user sends an email it travels across the internet or World Wide Web. It is called the World Wide Web because the internet is made up of thousands of servers or a ‘web of servers’. Each and every communication visits a minimum of 8 and a maximum of 32 servers before it reaches its intended destination. Each of these points of contact represents a security risk. Scripts, viruses, hackers and other devices can intercept the data at any time and can copy or alter it unnoticed.

The solution to the problem of online identification, authentication and privacy in computer based systems lies in the field of cryptography. Due to the non-physical nature of electronic communication, traditional methods of physically marking transactions with a seal or signature are useless. So an alternative mark must be coded into the information itself in order to identify the source and provide privacy against eavesdroppers.

In the 'real world' passports and ID cards identify people, crests or symbols identify institutions like the police or a hospital and a seal or stamp authenticates a document.

Consider the following questions carefully:

If you are trying to migrate an existing environment from another Legacy CA Authority to Digi-CA™, there is a ready-to-go solution that works independently from the Legacy CA. The customer can provide the information manually, or use migration engines provided by the Digi-CAST™ team.

In the ‘real world’ passports and ID cards identify people; crests or symbols identify institutions like the police or a hospital, for example; and a seal or stamp authenticates a document. In the Digital World, we use digital certificates to do the same thing.

Digi-CA™ replaces older Legacy CA systems using the latest in CA and PKI technologies and benefits from combining commercial and open source software initiatives. With Digi-CA™, all of the complexities and onerous technical overhead that were required by Legacy CAs have been simplified to a ‘user-friendly’ and usable level.