Obtaining personal certificates
You obtain your personal certificate from a Certification Authority (CA).
When you obtain a certificate from a trusted external CA, you pay for the service. When you are testing your system, or we need only to protect internal messages, we can create self-signed certificates. These are created and signed by the certificate management tool your system uses. Self-signed certificates cannot be used to authenticate certificates from outside your organization.
Figure 1 illustrates the process of obtaining a digital certificate from a CA.
Figure 1. Obtaining a digital certificate
Parent topic:
How digital certificates work