Certificates, Trust, and Network Encryption
Broadcom, Friday, October 9th, 2026
Day 7 of VMware's Cybersecurity Awareness Month series explains what certificates actually do and why encryption is not the same as trust.
Part of a 22-day Cybersecurity Awareness Month series on VMware Cloud Foundation, this post tackles common misunderstandings about certificates.
It argues that a certificate mainly ensures a connection is encrypted, while its claim about who is on the other end depends more on people and processes than on technology.
The article walks through public-key cryptography, how TLS reads the public key from a server's certificate, and what a certificate contains, including names, organization, validity dates and the issuing certificate authority.