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What is a digital certificate

A digital certificate is like a passport:

  • It provides information about the identity of the owner.

  • It is resistant to forgery.

  • It can be verified because it has been issued by an official, trusted agency.

The owner of a digital certificate can be a person, a device, a domain, or an application, such as an email program or a web browser.

Every browser shows security information in a slightly different way.

Example:

Chrome

Microsoft Edge

The padlock symbol is the starting point to retrieve the used certificate information. The color and shape of the padlock symbol depend on the browser.

Explore digital certificates

Digital certificates are visible when you open a browser and go to a secured website. The digital certificate is proof of the identity for the website. Before the connection has been established, the web server has sent its digital certificate to your browser.

When you are not familiar with digital certificates, use the following tour.

1. When you open a browser, in this example Microsoft Edge, and you browse to a secured website, the address bar shows https:// and a closed padlock symbol. The secure connection has been established via HTTPS.

Address bar

2. To see what digital certificate has been issued to a website, right-click the padlock icon.

Certificate information

3. Click [Certificate (valid)] to see more certificate information. The digital certificate technet.microsoft.com has been issued by Microsoft IT SSL SHA2.

General certificate information

4. Click [Certification path] and see how the browser has verified the digital certificate. The browser verified the entire certification path to ensure that the technet.microsoft.com certificate came from a trusted source.

Certification path information

5. Select the first certificate of the certification path and click [View Certificate]. In the example, the DigiCert Baltimore Root certificate has been issued by itself. For that reason, it is called a Root certificate.

Root certificate

6. Click [Details] to see more detailed information on the certificates. Click the [Learn more ...] links to read more information about certificates.

Certificate details