A Certification Authority (CA) identifies individuals and companies, and issues Digital Certificates to these entities.

A CA's primary value is its process of validation of individuals and companies, so that others may rely on the Digital Certificates whenever they are presented or appear.

What is a Digital Certificate?

A Digital Certificate contains information about the certificate holder, such as their name and email address, validity dates of the certificate, as well as the issuer (SecureNet Certificates Pty Ltd) who has digitally signed the contents of the certificate.

What is a Digital Signature?

A Digital Signature is a long 20 or 30 digit number, generated by complex mathematics, to uniquely identify a document or transmission of data.

The inputs to the calculation are typically every character of a document and your private key.  The properties of the calculation are such that:

1. The signature is unique for this document;
2. A change to any single character in the document produces a large change in the signature, and;
3. It is impossible to duplicate the signature without knowlege of your private key (itself a long number).

Thus, a recipient of a digitally signed document can be assured that you sent it and it is unmodified in transit.

It is important to remember that a digital signature is not just a digitised (image) of your handwritten signature, but instead is a mathematical calculation using something secret to you (your private key) and the contents of the document itself.

What is Importing Certificates?

Both Microsoft and Netscape Version 4+ products have a built-in ability to export certificates and keys into a backup form, with a password, so that you can keep copies or install them on multiple PCs e.g. at your office and at home.

SecureNet Certificates provides you with your Certificates and keys on a diskette, with a highly secure long password mailed separately.

We provide you with a utility program so that you can convert the contents of the diskette to the backup format, with your own shorter password or passphrase, which can be easily imported to these browsers.

Certificates are also available on smart card.