Web Server Certification

Servers that wish to perform client authentication and allow clients to perform server authentication must be certified by the Certificate Authority (CA) and provide an enrollment service for clients. The process of becoming certified is called server certification and is an interaction between the server and one or more CAs. The following steps are performed in server certification:

1. The server obtains and installs a CA certificate provided by the CA that issues client certificates. The CA certificate is needed by the server in order to validate client certificates. For more information see Server Installation of CA Certificates.
   
   
2. The server requests and installs a server certificate issued by the appropriate CA (it might not be the same CA as the one in Step 1). The server certificate will be used to allow clients to perform server authentication.

For further information about server certification see Microsoft Internet Information Server Certification and Netscape Web Server Certification.