Certificate

Deprecated.

A new certificate handling package is created in the Java platform. This Certificate interface is entirely deprecated and is here to allow for a smooth transition to the new package.

This is an interface of abstract methods for managing a variety of identity certificates. An identity certificate is a guarantee by a principal that a public key is that of another principal. (A principal represents an entity such as an individual user, a group, or a corporation.)

In particular, this interface is intended to be a common abstraction for constructs that have different formats but important common uses. For example, different types of certificates, such as X.509 certificates and PGP certificates, share general certificate functionality (the need to encode and decode certificates) and some types o