A Certificate of Authority is a document that verifies that a foreign entity is registered in the state of Georgia.

A root certificate is the digital certificate of an Issuing Authority. The public key in this certificate is used to verify the digital signature of the Issuing Authority. The Issuing Authority's digital signature is present in all certificates that it issues. The root certificate therefore, can be used to verify the integrity of any certificate that was issued by it.

The company will need to complete the application for Certificate of Authority, which may be downloaded from the Corporations Division website at: www.sos.state.ga.us/corporations. The Certificate of Authority should be submitted along with an original Certificate of Existence, which is obtained from the "home state" of the corporation and must be no more than 90 days old.

XRI root authority is the first subsegment in an XRI authority segment. An XRI root authority may either be a GCS character or a cross-reference. For example, xri://@foo*bar uses the "@" root authority and xri://(http://example.com) uses the "(http://example.com)" root authority. Root authorities allow communities to share a common namespace and uniquely identify shared resources (or resources that are used by multiple parties).

A single-page "Application for Certificate of Authority" is filed along with an original certificate of existence ("good standing") from the "home" state. The certificate of existence must be no more than 90 days old. The filing fee is $225. The corporation will then file an annual registration, and $30 fee, between January 1 and April 1. Annual registration notices are mailed to the principal office addresses of all active corporations each January.

When connecting to a webserver over SSL, the visitor's browser decides whether or not to trust the website's SSL certificate based on which Certification Authority has issued the actual SSL certificate. To determine this, the browser looks at its list of trusted issuing authorities - represented by a collection of Trusted Root CA certificates added into the browser by the browser vendor (such as Microsoft and Netscape).

The Trustis FPS Root Certificate is available for download here. You must have the Trustis FPS Root Certificate and the Chamber SimplySign Issuing Certificate installed before you can proceed to use your certificate online. Clicking on the link provided will do this for you. Alternatively, the Trustis FPS Root Certificate can be obtained through Microsoft Windows Update.

After January 1, 2000, you will get this message when using versions of Netscape Navigator older than version 4.06 or when using Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.01 for the Mac, when accessing some secure Web sites. If you click the "continue" button, things will work fine. To avoid getting these spurious messages, upgrade to a newer version of the browser you are using. Web clients (Netscape, MS Internet Explorer, etc.

When very sensitive data is involved (like Credit Card information), it is not enough to know the information is encrypted. It is also necessary to make sure you're giving your data to someone you trust, and not to someone else. In fact, it's a common practice these days (known as 'phishing') to clone a trusted site's website and lure people into entering their private information into these "clones".