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Certificate Chains, And How They Work
Certificate chains are used to be able to verify an end user certificate against a list of intermediaries and a root authority. We are going to explain this in a bit more detail.
The Certificate Authority
In order for an SSL certificate to be trusted, a certificate must have been issued by a certificate authority (CA) that is included in the trusted store of the device that is connecting.
If the certificate was not issued by a trusted CA, the connecting device will then check to see if the certificate of the issuing CA was issued by a trusted CA, and so on until either a trusted CA is found or no trusted CA can be found.
Common certificate authorities
Commonly used certificate authorities, such as Verisign, DigiCert, and Entrust, are automatically trusted by most browsers. However, if you use an untrusted internal certificate authority to generate SSL certificates for internal resources, you will be nagged by your browser when you attempt to connect.