Thawte

Thawte Consulting is a certificate authority (CA) for X.509 certificates. Thawte was founded in 1995 by Mark Shuttleworth in South Africa and is the second largest public CA on the internet.

In 1999 VeriSign acquired Thawte in a stock purchase which ultimately made Shuttleworth hundreds of millions of US dollars and thereby enabled Shuttleworth to become the second space tourist.

See also

• Cryptography
• Public key certificate