What is the difference between signing Certificate and Encryption Certificate?

tags:

views:

274

answers:

2

Q:

What is the difference between signing Certificate and Encryption Certificate?

What is the difference between between signing certificate and encryption certificate?

I see that signing certificate cannot be used for encrypting the data only encryption certificate. What is the technical difference? Does both have public key and private or only encryption cert will have PP key?

A:

The only difference is the value of the purpose field in the certificate. The issuer of the certificate chooses for what purpose the certificate is created.

Richard 2009-09-15 09:05:22

I acknowledge your answer with thanks.But how does the value or attribute limits the functionality of the certificate? Encyrption certificate will not be used for signing and siging for encryption? when we have both public key and private in both certs how will it be limited?

2009-09-15 09:09:54

The certificate says what it can be used for. The applications doing the signing and verifying check the purpose field. If you wrote your own tool chain you could ignore that field --- but would give errors for anyone else. There is nothing in the underlying signing algorithm that is changed by the purpose (which converts a byte stream into another array of bytes).

Richard 2009-09-15 10:28:03

A:

A certificate contains only the public certificate. Nothing can stop you from using the private key for whatever things you want to do with it.

As said before, a certificate is for the other party to deal with - after you have signed or encrypted something, the other party needs to make the decision if it is happy with it. It then checks the certificate and its flags to make sure it could be used for the operation, under the policy set for the other party.

martin 2009-11-07 14:26:15

ansaurus

tags:

views:

answers:

What is the difference between signing Certificate and Encryption Certificate?

related questions