## Introduction to Certificates

Certificates were originally defined by ITU (CCITT) and the latest definitions are described in , but those definitions are (as always) not working.

Working certificate definitions for the Internet Community are found in the the PKIX RFCs and . The parsing of certificates in the Erlang/OTP SSL application is based on those RFCS.

Certificates are defined in terms of ASN.1 (). For an introduction to ASN.1 see ASN.1 Information Site.

## PKIX Certificates

Certificate handling is now handled by the public_key application.

DER encoded certificates returned by ssl:peercert/1 can for example be decoded by the public_key:pkix_decode_cert/2 function.