ediSecurityCertificate

The ediSecurityCertificate object contain an X.509 Digital Certificate.  A Digital Certificate is a file containing the public key of an entity, which has been verified by a third-party of its validity.  The third-party is also known as a Certificate Authority (CA), and it verifies that the owner of the certificate is who he claims to be by signing the certificate with CAs own certificate.  The certificate only contains the public key and, since the public key is not a secret, the certificate can be distributed and published to any trading partner without any loss of security to the owner.  The trading partner can then use this certificate for encrypting data and verifying signatures.  The certificate does not contain the private key, but it can be associated to a private key.  It can, for example, contain the name of a private key file, or contain information that associates it to a Cryptographic Service Provider key container.  So should the certificate ever be referenced where it is needed to decrypt or sign data, the associated private keys can be used for the operation.

There are three properties of the certificate that makes it unique:

 

Self-Signed Certificate

A self-signed certificate is a certificate that has the same subject name and issuer name.  That is, the entity has issued itself a certificate.  These certificates are not secure, and are mainly used between trading partners who are confident about their secure loop of transmission.  For Framework EDI, these self-signed certificates are normally used for testing purposes only. 

 

Methods

Properties