Quick summary of the main purpose here: X.509 certs are used in public

key infrastructure for protocols such as SSL and SET. These certificates

involve ISO/CCITT standard technologies such as ASN.1/DER, which control

the format of the data being transmitted. X.509 itself describes the

content of the data (e.g. X.500 user name, public key for that user, more)

and how to sign it.

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The X.509 support in JDK 1.2 builds on the java.security signature and

key management APIs. The following packages provide the X.509 support:

sun.security.util ... holds DER utilities, for parsing and generating

streams of DER-encoded data values, including object identifiers.

sun.security.x509 ... basic X.509 certificate parsing and generation

framework, including X.509 keys, X.500 names, algorithm IDs,

X.509 v3 extensions, and more.

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Information which may be useful when you work with X.509 certificates is

found in:

The IETF has a public key infrastructure working group, PKIX.

See http://www.ietf.org for more information.

RFC 1422, which describes the key management infrastructure for

the Privacy Enhanced Mail (PEM) system. It builds on X.509,

and is perhaps the most useful overview I've found.

RFC 1777, which describes the Lightweight Directory Access

Protocol (LDAP) that many organizations are expecting will help

address online certificate distribution over the Internet.

RFC 3280, which describes the Internet X.509 Public Key

Infrastructure Certificate and CRL Profile.

RSA DSI has a bunch of "Public Key Cryptography Standards" (PKCS) which

have been relatively well accepted. They build on top of the X.509

infrastructure. You can FTP them from ftp://ftp.rsa.com/pub/pkcs, in

either PostScript or ASCII format.

RSA DSI has also provided a "Layman's Guide" to ASN.1/DER, with

examples from the X.509 and PKCS standards. This is available from

the PKCS FTP area noted above.