What is a network certificate?

A network certificate is a public key of the network plus some additional information that is cryptographically signed by Staex private key. A network certificate is used to verify that a node certificate belongs to the corresponding network. To sign the node certificate you need the corresponding network private key. Node, network and Staex certificates form a chain of trust that is used to verify legitimacy of each node in Staex network.

Unless specified otherwise two nodes certificates of which were signed by different network keys can not communicate with each other. This behavior can be overridden with trusted-nodes and trusted-networks settings.

Network certificates are presented in the arguments to many commands as BASE64-encoded strings. This is the string that mcc init command expects, for example.

Use mcc certificates command to show node and network certificates.