How a Digital certificate works?

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Let's break down the process step by step: 

1. Key Pair Generation:- You generate a pair of cryptographic keys: a public key and a private key. - The private key remains on your machine and is kept secret. - The public key is used to encrypt messages that only you can decrypt with your private key. 

2. Certificate Request (CSR) to CA:- You create a Certificate Signing Request (CSR) containing your public key and some information about yourself (like your name and domain). - You send this CSR to a Certificate Authority (CA) to request a digital certificate. 

3. CA Verification and Digital Certificate Issuance:- The CA receives your CSR and verifies your identity (ensuring you own the domain or email address you're requesting a certificate for). - If everything checks out, the CA creates a digital certificate for you. - This digital certificate contains your public key, your identity information, and a digital signature created using the CA's private key. 

4. Receiving the Digital Certificate:- The CA sends you back the digital certificate. - This certificate includes your public key, but it also contains the CA's digital signature. 

5. Sharing the Public Key :- To share your public key with others, you don't need to manually distribute it. Instead, you share your digital certificate. - When others want to send you encrypted messages, they don't use your public key directly. Instead, they use the public key in your digital certificate. 

6. Validation by Others:- When someone wants to send you an encrypted message, they obtain your digital certificate. - They use the CA's public key (which is widely trusted and typically pre-installed in software) to verify the CA's digital signature on your certificate. - If the signature is valid, they can trust that the public key within the certificate belongs to you. 

7. Encryption and Communication:- The sender uses the public key from your digital certificate to encrypt the message. - They send you the encrypted message. - You use your private key (which you kept secure on your machine) to decrypt and read the message. 

So, your public key is effectively shared when you share your digital certificate. Others use the CA's public key to verify the certificate's authenticity and extract your public key from it. This process ensures that the public key they use is indeed yours and has been verified by a trusted authority (the CA).

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