Chain Trust and Certificate Authorities

Certificates are created in a hierarchy where each individual certificate is linked to the CA that issued the certificate. The CA’s certificate then links to the CA that issued the original CA’s certificate. This process is repeated until the Root CA’s certificate is reached. Root CA’s certificate is inherently trusted.

Digital certificates are used to authenticate an entity by relying on this hierarchy, also called a chain of trust. You can view any certificate's chain using the MMC snap-in by double-clicking any certificate, then clicking the Certificate Path.