SWITCHpki Certificates

The goal of SWITCHpki is to provide organisations in the Swiss higher education sector with high-quality, general-purpose and publicly-trusted X.509 certificates. The following types of certificates are available to members of the SWITCH community.

Business SSL certificates

Server certificates for applications which are secured by the SSL/TLS protocol. Also known as organization validated (OV) certificates, i.e. certificates including the verified legal name of the organization to which they are issued.

EV SSL certificates

Server certificates for Web applications secured by the SSL/TLS protocol. EV is short for Extended Validation and requires more strict issuance procedures, see the EV SSL Certificate Guidelines published by the CA/Browser Forum for more information. EV SSL certificates are particularly suitable for sites visited by Web browser users, as they receive special treatment in the URL bar (organization name and country highlighted in green).

EV SSL URL bar UI
URL bar display for EV SSL protected site in common browsers

General-purpose user certificates

For organizations with users who wish to sign or encrypt e-mail messages with the S/MIME standard, SWITCHpki provides personal certificates to members of organizations belonging to the SWITCH community, provided that their local registration authority (RA) approves the request on behalf of the organization. Further information can be found on the How to request a SWITCHpki QuoVadis user certificate (personal certificate) page.