Module java.base

Class Certificate

  • Direct Known Subclasses:
    X509Certificate

    @Deprecated(since="9")
    public abstract class Certificate
    extends Object
    Deprecated.
    Use the classes in java.security.cert instead.

    Abstract class 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.)

    This class is an abstraction for certificates that have different formats but important common uses. For example, different types of certificates, such as X.509 and PGP, share general certificate functionality (like encoding and verifying) and some types of information (like a public key).

    X.509, PGP, and SDSI certificates can all be implemented by subclassing the Certificate class, even though they contain different sets of information, and they store and retrieve the information in different ways.

    Note: The classes in the package javax.security.cert exist for compatibility with earlier versions of the Java Secure Sockets Extension (JSSE). New applications should instead use the standard Java SE certificate classes located in java.security.cert.

    Since:
    1.4
    See Also:
    X509Certificate