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leaf certificate
The specific certificate that proves a single website's identity, at the bottom of a chain of trust.
TLS security relies on a chain: a trusted root vouches for intermediates, which vouch for the actual site. The leaf certificate is that final end-entity cert bound to the exact domain you're connecting to — the one being validated when your browser shows a site is genuine. Everything above it exists only to establish that the leaf can be trusted.
See also
- key scheduleThe step-by-step process that derives the actual encryption keys used in a session from an initial shared secret.
- key materialThe actual secret bytes that make up a cryptographic key.
- MD5An old hash function, now considered broken for security, that turns data into a short fixed-size fingerprint.
Referenced by
IPv4 · key material · key schedule · low-order-point rejection · MD5