In cryptographic systems with hierarchical structure, a trust anchor is an authoritative entity for which trust is assumed and not derived. In the

X.509 In cryptography, X.509 is an International Telecommunication Union (ITU) standard defining the format of public key certificates. X.509 certificates are used in many Internet protocols, including TLS/SSL, which is the basis for HTTPS, the secu ...

architecture, a

root certificate In cryptography and computer security, a root certificate is a public key certificate that identifies a root certificate authority (CA). Root certificates are self-signed (and it is possible for a certificate to have multiple trust paths, say if ...

would be the trust anchor from which the whole chain of trust is derived. The trust anchor must be in the possession of the trusting party beforehand to make any further certificate path validation possible. Most operating systems provide a built-in list of self-signed root certificates to act as trust anchors for applications. The

Firefox Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements current ...

web browser also provides its own list of trust anchors. The end-user of an operating system or web browser is implicitly trusting in the correct operation of that software, and the software manufacturer in turn is delegating trust for certain cryptographic operations to the certificate authorities responsible for the root certificates.

References

Key management {{computer-security-stub