Microsoft has been working with leading Certificate Authorities, such as VeriSign and GTE, to develop digital certificates for use with Microsoft's Authenticode technology. These software publisher certificates are now available from VeriSign, with certificates from GTE and other certificate authorities to be available in the future. Software publishers are using these certificates to digitally sign their software code. If software has been digitally signed with these certificates, Internet Explorer can verify that the software originated from the named software publisher.
To see how this works, visit a site that has a slick demo or Java applet, or another software component that you need to download in order to view. If the component hasn't been digitally signed, Internet Explorer displays the following dialog box, which asks whether you want to download unverified software.
If the software has been digitally signed, Internet Explorer displays a certificate like the following. You can download this software with the same ease with which you pull a box of software off the shelf in your favorite retail computer store.
Tools for code-signing are available through the ActiveX SDK, and will be integrated
into Microsoft and leading third-party development tools. Microsoft implementation of code-signing supports existing certificate standards, X.509 certificate format, and PKCS #7 signed
data standards.