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Certificates

A certificate is a digitally signed statement from the issuer (an individual, an organization, a website or a firm), saying that the public key (and some other information) of some other entity has a particular value. When data is digitally signed, the signature can be verified to check the data integrity and authenticity. Integrity means that the data has not been modified. Authenticity means the data comes indeed from the entity that claims to have created and signed it. Certificates are kept in special repositories called keystores.

All keystore entries (key and trusted certificate entries) are accessed via unique aliases. An alias must be assigned for every new entry of either a key or certificate as a reference for that entity. No keystore can store an entity if its alias already exists in that keystore and cannot store trusted certificates generated with keys in its keystore.

Oxygen XML Editor provides two types of keystores: Java Key Store (JKS) and Public-Key Cryptography Standards version 12 (PKCS-12). A keystore file is protected by a password. In a PKCS 12 keystore you should not store a certificate without alias together with other certificates, with or without alias, as in such a case the certificate without alias cannot be extracted from the keystore.

To configure the options for a certificate or to validate it, open the Preferences dialog box (Options > Preferences) and go to XML > XML Signing Certificates. This opens the certificates preferences page.