A Certificate Authority (CA) is a trusted entity that issues digital certificates to authenticate content sent from web servers. These digital certificates are used to cryptographically link an entity with a public key, ensuring trust in content delivered online. CAs play a vital role in the chain of trust, a hierarchical trust model that consists of root certificates, intermediate certificates, and SSL certificates. They provide a flexible structure for conferring the validity of the trust anchor and enable digital identity validation for authentication and non-repudiation
. CA certificates are essential for ensuring data confidentiality, enabling digital identity validation, and achieving data integrity verification through cryptographic hashing. They are a fundamental component of the public key infrastructure (PKI) and are used to establish secure connections and validate the authenticity of digital entities
