As the basis for securing many online interactions, such as SSL certificates or transport layer security (TLS) certificates used between your browser and web servers, or PKI architecture used to keep networks of IoT devices safe from attack, the role of digitally signed X.509 certificates is to enable trusted exchanges.
This is achieved by leveraging asymmetric cryptography, where a user has both a public and private key pair tied to their identity. This allows anyone else to decrypt data to send to the user using the public, which they can then decrypt with their private key.
Web and PKI networks rely on the trust enabled by CAs after the protocols are accepted, and they can communicate securely with other parties. There are a number of standards and procedures which must be followed for a CA to gain and maintain the trust of network users.
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