What is the Registration Authority?
The Registration Authority (RA) used in Public Key Infrastructure is a function for certificate enrollment. It is responsible for receiving Certificate lifecycle management functions and is even accountable for receiving signing request certificates from servers or other applications.
It verifies the users’ requests for a digital certificate and then tells them to issue it through Certificate Authority (CA).Registration Authority in the public critical infrastructure. It is responsible for validating requests for digital certificates. It is a part of the PRI, i.e., public critical infrastructure. The Registration Authority ensures that the public key is bound to the particular individual and assigned to provide non-repudiation. Registration authorities add control and management levels to create a well-controlled, secure, and trustworthy environment.
What is a Certificate Authority (CA)?
The X.509 format is the most used format for the Public Key Certificates. A certificate authority, also known as a 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, even by party, depending upon the certificate. This allows relying parties to depend on the signatures or the private key’s assertions corresponding to the certified public key.
The Certificates Authority’s main task is to issue certificates. It issues digital certificates containing the owner’s identity 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 also validates or confirms by the CA that the public key belongs to the particular person, organization, or entity noted in the certificate.
Just like CAs, the Registration Authority is often audited, ensuring the validity and legality of the identification process. We can see that LuxTrust has been a Certificate Authority since its inception in 2005 that all of the Registration Authority operations are daily controlled in the frame of the Certification Authority’s internal audits; they are audited only once a year through the onsite missions and the context of LuxTrust’s annual certification audits. Equipped with more than 700,000 customers worldwide and very trusted digital certificates, the company has probably disposed of an extensive network of RAs in Luxembourg and abroad.
Registration Authority is 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 information for network activities like the Internet, banking, etc.
The Registration Authority does not have the signing authority of a Certification Authority; it only manages the access and accounting of certificates.
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