Security considerations for digital certificates

A digital certificate alone cannot prove identity.

The digital certificate only allows you to verify the identity of the digital certificate owner by providing the public key that is needed to check the owner's digital signature. You can safely send your public key to another because your data cannot be decrypted without the other part of the key pair, your private key. Therefore, the owner must protect the private key that belongs to the public key in the digital certificate. All communications of the owner of a digital certificate can be deciphered, if the private key is known. Without the private key, a digital certificate cannot be misused.