Enhancing security with certificates
Certificates are used for many facets of secure communications globally. Your hardware and software vendors often digitally sign their drivers and operating system packages. Trusted authorities use certificates to ensure you can safely use DNS and the internet. The list of use cases for certificates is significant. Generally, these security certificates are obtained through a global certificate authority (CA) organization. Many internet service providers (ISPs) also have the ability to grant their customers an SSL certificate.
These shared system certificates enable things like NSS, TLS, OpenSSL, and applications to have a joint shared source of trust via a system certificate (trust anchor). Not having an SSL certificate will prevent you from using an encrypted web server.
There is also the ability in Linux to create a self-signed certificate. These are generally good enough for internal lab work but are considered insufficient in a production...
