Certificate Authorities

A certificate authority is a trusted organization that issues digital certificates to websites, businesses, and also individuals. When a CA issues an SSL certificate, it verifies the website domain and the organization behind it. This helps validate the trust between users and the website, ensuring that sensitive data is able to stay private. To view a site's certificate information, click on the icon in the picture below and then click "Connection is secure." This will then pop up a page displaying information about the certificate.

Why are certificate authorities important? As I talked about in a previous blog, the internet relies on encryption to protect sensitive information. If there is not a way to verify the identity of websites and businesses, hackers could easily impersonate legitimate sites and trick users. A good thing to note is that even though a site has a certificate, it doesn't mean it's trustworthy. Hackers can still obtain domain validated certificates for fake websites.

You can set up your own CA in a lab or private environment for internal use. However, this does not mean browsers will trust this digital certificate. If you want a client to trust it, then you must manually install the root CA on the device.

There is a lot more I can go into about certificates but for now I am going to focus on the exam I am taking and after that the plan is to make a complete guide for the DevNet Exam as I will be starting completely from scratch with it with zero automation knowledge aside from a bit of Python. It will be fun! Goal is to finish up ENSLD, move onto automation and finish those up then dive into CCIE content.