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Typical Certificates

As we shall see, one of the most common uses of CA-signed X.509 certificates is in Web Commerce, where they are normally called site certificates. An X.509 certificate encodes a variety of information using ASN.1 (see later) non-text syntax, and is not "human-readable", however software allows us to extract the content from a certificate. Here are two (fairly dated) examples:
Text of site certificate from amazon.com
Text of site certificate from www.ansett.com.au, exceedingly historical now:-)
NB: Web browsers normally are configured to trust a small set of CAs (or certificate issuers) -- either by configuration (via a Preferences option), or (in earlier versions) established at compile-time.
 
Lecture 19: Encryption #3 -- Practical Encryption Copyright © 2005 P.Scott, La Trobe University Bendigo.

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