Digital Certificates, exhaustive set of their uses and references

Question

I am a newbie of sorts as far as particulars of security is concerned.can somebody list all the possible uses of a digital certificate? it is used in SSL, signing and what else? Also is there a good reference book or article to understand certificates in its entirety?

Answer 1

That's a bit like asking for an exhaustive list of the uses of paper.

In a broad sense, certificates do one thing: linking a public key to a name.

That public key can belong to a signing algorithm, or a key exchange algorithm, or an encryption algorithm. So literally any kind of public-key cryptography can be put into a certificate.

So in a broad sense, your question reduces to: "can somebody list all the possible uses of cryptography?".

I would start with a general-purpose cryptography text book, paying special attention to the chapters on public key crypto.