What is a digital certificate?

A Digital Certificate if a fancy term for the technology that embeds all the legal evidence into the document that's being signed.

A digital certificate is an electronic record containing a user’s public key. Digital certificates are used to identify who a key pair belongs to. Certificates also declare limits on when and how the private key can be used.

Certificates are issued and managed by Certification Authorities (CAs), who vouch for the accuracy of the information they contain.  CAs are called “authorities” because they vouch for the accuracy of the information in the certificates they issue. CAs also maintain repositories of published certificates and certificate revocation lists.

Certificates are digitally signed by their issuer to prevent tampering. When the signatures on the certificate are verified, that confirms who issued the certificate and shows whether the information in the certificate has been altered.

SIGNiX is authorized as an official Certification Authority and also uses other broadly trusted CAs, including Symantec. All SIGNiX certificates are in X.509 version 3 format. SIGNiX certificates are signed using 2048-bit keys.