What is Registration Authority?
Registration Authority or RA used in Public Key Infrastructure is a function for the certificate enrollment. It is responsible for receiving Certificate lifecycle management functions and is even accountable for receiving signing requests certificates from the servers or other applications.
It verifies the users’ requests for a digital certificate, and then it tells them to issue it by Certificate Authority (CA).Registration Authority in the public key infrastructure. It is responsible for validating requests for digital certificates. It is a part of the PRI, i.e., public key infrastructure. The Registration Authority makes sure that the pubic key should be bounded to the particular individual; it is assigned to ensure the non-repudiation. Registration authorities add control and management level to create a well-controlled, secure, and trustworthy environment.
What is Certificate Authority (CA)?
The X.509 format is the most used format for the Public Key Certificates. A certificate authority known as the certification authority (CA) is an entity that issues digital certificates. A digital certificate provides accreditation to the ownership of a public key by the named subject of the certificate. The certificate trusts a Certificate Authority; therefore, it acts as a trusted third-party and even by party, depending upon the certificate. This allows relying parties to depend on the signatures or on the private key’s assertions that correspond to the certified public key.
The main task of the Certificates Authority is to issue certificates. It issues digital certificates that contain the identity of the owner and the public key. The matching private key is not publicly available but kept secret by the end-user who generated the key pair. This certificate is also a validation or confirmation by the CA that the public key in the certificate belongs to the particular person, organization, or other entity noted in the certificate.
Just as CAs, Registration Authority is often audited, ensuring the validity and legality of the identification process. We can see that In LuxTrust’s, LuxTrust has been a Certificate Authority since its inception in 2005 as in that all of the Registration Authority operations are daily controlled in the frame of the Certification Authority’s internal audits; they have audited only once a year through the onsite missions and in the context of LuxTrust’s annual certification audits. Equipped more than 700,000 customers worldwide with the very trusted digital certificates, the company has probably disposed of an extensive network of RAs in Luxembourg and even abroad.
Registration Authority is a part of a Public key infrastructure (PKI). It is a networked system that allows companies and their users to exchange information and money safely and securely. Its motive is to safely transfer the information for the network activities like the internet, banking, etc.
Registration Authority does not have any of the signing authority of a Certification Authority, and it only manages the access and accounting of certificates.
