A scenario involving a person (Georges) and his bank guides you through the concepts of
secured communication, certificates, and certificate authorities.
Secured communications
Secured communications are important. If an application wants to send or receive messages from a financial, business, or personnel application on the web, it must be able to authenticate the origin of the message, ensure that no malicious application has altered the original message, and ensure that no third party application can intercept the message.
Certificates
An SSL certificate is a kind of digital identity card that associates the public key with a unique digital thumbprint identifying an individual, a server, or any other entity.
Certificate authorities
When a certificate authority signs a certificate, it is validating that the certificate is valid.
Certificates and private keys storage
The entire concept of security is based on the publication of the public key, and the privacy of the associated private key. For maximum security, it is critical to restrict the access of the private key to the owner of the certificate and associated private key.