Certificate validation is a key part of the process of authenticating users and systems and securing network communications through the use of digital certificates. To validate a digital certificate, a Windows public key infrastructure (PKI)-enabled application must determine whether the certificate and the public key it contains are trustworthy.
Validating a certificate requires the certificate-validation logic in the PKI-enabled application to perform a series of checks on different parts of the certificate. Let's examine those checks and other aspects of the certificate-validation process. By gaining an in-depth understanding of how certificate validation works, you'll be better prepared to recognize and solve certificate-validation problems when they occur.
Certificate-Validation Checks
The validation process performs the following checks on a certificate: digital signature, trust, time, revocation, and formatting. A certificate is invalid if it doesn't pass one or more of these checks. During the digital signature check, the validation software uses a trustworthy public key to validate the digital signature that the certificate issuer (i.e., the Certificate Authority--CA) has applied to the certificate content. The key can be the public key of the issuing CA or of another CA that's part of the certificate's certificate chain--a hierarchical trust model that I explain later. . . .
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