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<chapter>
  <header>
    <copyright>
      <year>2003</year><year>2009</year>
      <holder>Ericsson AB. All Rights Reserved.</holder>
    </copyright>
    <legalnotice>
      The contents of this file are subject to the Erlang Public License,
      Version 1.1, (the "License"); you may not use this file except in
      compliance with the License. You should have received a copy of the
      Erlang Public License along with this software. If not, it can be
      retrieved online at http://www.erlang.org/.
    
      Software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS"
      basis, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See
      the License for the specific language governing rights and limitations
      under the License.
    
    </legalnotice>

    <title>PKIX Certificates</title>
    <prepared>UAB/F/P Peter H&ouml;gfeldt</prepared>
    <docno></docno>
    <date>2003-06-09</date>
    <rev>A</rev>
    <file>pkix_certs.xml</file>
  </header>

  <section>
    <title>Introduction to Certificates</title>
    <p>Certificates were originally defined by ITU (CCITT) and the latest 
      definitions are described in <cite id="X.509"></cite>, but those definitions
      are (as always) not working. 
    </p>
    <p>Working certificate definitions for the Internet Community are found
      in the the PKIX RFCs <cite id="rfc3279"></cite> and <cite id="rfc3280"></cite>. 
      The parsing of certificates in the Erlang/OTP SSL application is
      based on those RFCS. 
    </p>
    <p>Certificates are defined in terms of ASN.1 (<cite id="X.680"></cite>).
      For an introduction to ASN.1 see <url href="http://asn1.elibel.tm.fr/">ASN.1 Information Site</url>.
    </p>    
  </section>

  <section>
    <title>PKIX Certificates</title>
    <p>Certificate handling is now handled by the <c>public_key</c> application.</p>
    <p>
      DER encoded certificates returned by <c>ssl:peercert/1</c> can for example 
      be decoded by the <c>public_key:pkix_decode_cert/2</c> function. 
    </p>
  </section>
</chapter>


