Certificate Signatures

Vocera CA issues a certificate using hashing to generate a digest and then creates a certificate by encrypting the digest with its private key.

Hashing is a method used to obtain a hash, also known as the digital fingerprint of a message. The hash codes are unique and have a fixed length of 128 or 160 bits. Some examples are Message Digest 5 (MD5) and Secure Hash Algorithm. Vocera supports both Secure Hash Algorithm 1 (SHA-1) and (SHA-2). SHA-1 and SHA-2 are two different versions of the Secure Hashing Algorithm, and SHA-2 is an improved version of SHA-1.

They differ in the following aspects: