CAcert
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| Nonprofit organization | |
| Industry | Certificate authority |
| Founded | 24 July 2003 |
| Founder | Duane Groth |
| Headquarters | Oatley, New South Wales, Australia |
| Website | www |
CAcert.org is a community-driven certificate authority that issues free public key certificates to the public. CAcert has over 334,000 verified users and has issued over 1,285,000 certificates as of July 2016[update].
These certificates can be used to digitally sign and encrypt email, authenticate and authorize users connecting to websites and secure data transmission over the Internet. Any application that supports the Secure Socket Layer (SSL) can make use of certificates signed by CAcert, as can any application that uses X.509 certificates, e.g. for encryption or code signing and document signatures.
CAcert Inc. is an incorporated non-profit association registered in New South Wales (Australia) since July 2003 which runs CAcert.org. It has members living in many different countries and a board of 7 members.
CAcert, like most other CAs, automatically signs certificates for email addresses which are verified as belonging to the requester, and for domains for which certain email addresses (such as "hostmaster@example.com") are verified as belonging to the requester. Thus it operates as a robot certificate authority. These certificates may be considered weak given the fact that CAcert does not emit any information in the certificates other than the domain name or email address (the CommonName field in X.509 certificates). However an argument can be made that domain verification is the only element within a certificate that can be trusted and proven, and that the domain name is the key element on which a user should base their trust.
CAcert does not do Extended Validation certificates. That kind of certificate involves a non-automated verification of the identity of the requesting party, which may offer a false sense of security. The more important method of creating trust is that of verification of the domain itself.
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