About Class - 3 Digital Signature Certificate
Class-3 Certificates are issued to individuals, companies and government organizations. They can be used both for personal and commercial purposes. They are typically used for electronic commerce applications such as electronic banking, electronic data interchange (EDI), and membership-based on-line services, where security is a major concern.

The level of trust created by the Digital Certificate is based on the authentication procedures used by the CA to verify your identity and the service guarantees offered by the CA to back up that authentication.

(LRA) DSC uses various procedures to obtain evidence of your identity before issuing you the Class-3 Certificate. During verification, you will also need to be physically present before a Registration Authority (RA), qualified by (LRA) DSC due to their neutrality and reliability. These validation procedures provide stronger assurances of an applicant's identity.

Class-3 Certificates issued by the (LRA) DSC are legally valid under the Indian IT Act 2000.

Types of Certificate
(LRA) DSC offers Signing and Encryption types of Personal Digital Certificates, which can be used for Digital Signature and Encryption purposes respectively.

A provision is also available to back-up the credentials you have used to receive encrypted messages/documents, so that the encrypted messages/documents can be recovered if you have lost the private key or if required in your absence, using your backed-up credentials. This can be of great help for organizations, wherein, it is necessary to recover the encrypted information received by an employee after he/she has left the organization.

A. Signing Certificate
The Signing Certificate is used for preparing the Digital Signature that provides Authenticity, Non-Repudiation and Integrity to electronic communication. These Certificates can be used to digitally sign documents, messages, email and can also be used as an identification for the electronic application and in SSL communication with a Web Server.The Subscriber generates the signing private/public key pair on a trustworthy medium and assumes the responsibility for safeguarding the private key.The credentials used for Digital Signature cannot be backed-up as it violates the notion of Authenticity and Non-Repudiation.

B. Encryption Certificate
The Encryption Certificate is used for encrypting documents, messages and other forms of electronic communication that provide confidentiality. This type of Certificate is backed-up. To achieve this, the credentials (Key-pairs) are generated at the CA end unlike the other types of Certificates where the credentials (Key-pairs) are generated at the Subscriber's end. The CA backs-up the key-pair and sends a copy to the Subscriber in a highly secure manner.

Class 3 Digital Certificate Enrollment Procedure
Certificate enrollment procedure for a New User

You need to register for a user account and then perform all steps as below to complete the certificate enrollment procedure.

Note: You must have a valid e-mail address. (If you do not have a valid e-mail address, please create one before registering or applying for a Digital Certificate.) The Digital Certificate issued to an email address cannot be used with any other email address.