What are digital certificates?
Digital certificates are the digital equivalent (i.e. electronic format) of physical or paper certificates. Examples of physical certificates are drivers licenses, passports or membership cards. Certificates serve as identity of an individual for a certain purpose, e.g. a drivers license identifies someone who can legally drive in a particular country. Likewise, a digital certificate can be presented electronically to prove your identity or your right to access information or services on the Internet.
What exactly is a digital signature?
Just as a handwritten signature is affixed to a printed letter for verification that the letter originated from its purported sender, digital signature performs the same task for an electronic message.
A digital signature is an encrypted version of a message digest, attached together with a message. A secure digital signature system consists of two parts: A method of signing a document such that forgery is detected, and A method of verifying that a signature was actually generated by whomever it represents Asymmetric/ Public key vs. Symmetric/ Secret key: which cryptography system is better? A combination of both. The action of encrypting information with public-key cryptography is significantly slower than encrypting with a secret key. However the drawback of the secret-key system is that, secret keys must be transmitted either manually or through a communication channel, and there may be a chance that others can discover the secret keys during transmission.
This is not a problem with public-key cryptography, as private keys never need to be transmitted or revealed to anyone. Each user has sole responsibility for protecting his or her private key. So, in practice public-key cryptography is used with secret-key cryptography to get the best of both worlds. A system that uses public-key cryptography first generates a secret key and uses the secret key to encrypt the message. Public-key cryptography key is then used to encrypt the secret key, which then is attached to the secret key-encrypted message.
