‘certificate’ or ‘electronic certificate’ means an electronic file, issued by a certification authority, which binds a public key with a certificate subscriber’s identity and is used for all or some of the following: (a) to verify that a public key belongs to a certificate subscriber; (b) to authenticate a certificate subscriber; (c) to check a certificate’s subscriber signature; (d) to encrypt a message addressed to a certificate subscriber; (e) to verify a certificate subscriber’s access rights to ESCB and Eurosystem electronic applications, systems, platforms and services. Any reference in this Decision to a certificate or electronic certificate includes a reference to the data carrier devices on which the certificate or electronic certificate is held;

‘ESCB and Eurosystem electronic applications, systems, platforms and services’ means the electronic applications, systems, platforms and services that the ESCB and/or the Eurosystem use when carrying out the tasks entrusted to them under the Treaty and the Statute of the ESCB;

‘public key infrastructure’ means the set of individuals, policies, procedures, and computer systems necessary to provide authentication, encryption, integrity and non-repudiation services by way of public and private key cryptography and electronic certificates;

‘user’ means either a certificate subscriber or a relying party, or both;

‘authentication’ means the process of verifying the identity of a certificate applicant or certificate subscriber;

‘ESCB central bank’ means either a Eurosystem central bank or a non-euro area NCB;

‘Eurosystem central bank’ means either an NCB of a Member State whose currency is the euro, including the providing central bank, or the ECB;

‘providing central bank’ means the NCB appointed by the Governing Council to develop the ESCB-PKI and to provide ESCB-PKI services on behalf of and for the benefit of the Eurosystem central banks;

‘non-euro area NCB’ means an NCB of a Member State whose currency is not the euro;

‘ESCB-PKI certification authority’ means the entity, trusted by users, to issue, manage, revoke and renew ESCB-PKI certificates in accordance with the ESCB/SSM certificate acceptance framework;

‘ESCB-PKI validation authority’ means the entity, trusted by users, which provides information on the validity of certificates issued by the ESCB-PKI certification authority;

‘certificate subscriber’ means either an individual who is the subject of an electronic certificate and has been issued an electronic certificate, or a technical component manager who has accepted an electronic certificate issued by the ESCB-PKI certification authority for a technical component, or both;

‘ESCB certificate acceptance framework’ means the criteria established by the ESCB ITC to identify the certification authorities, both internal and external to the ESCB, which can be trusted in relation to ESCB and Eurosystem electronic applications, systems, platforms and services;

‘registration authority’ means an entity, trusted by users, which verifies the identity of a certificate applicant before the ESCB-PKI certification authority issues a certificate;

‘relying party’ means an individual or an entity other than a certificate subscriber which accepts and relies on a certificate;

‘audit policy’ means the ESCB audit policy defined by the Governing Council on 7 October 1998, as published on the ECB’s website ( 1 );

‘certificate applicant’ means an individual who requests the issuance of a certificate for themself or for a technical component;

‘technical component’ means any software or any hardware equipment that can be identified by using electronic certificates;

‘competent authority’ means either a national competent authority or the ECB;

‘national competent authority’ (NCA) means a national competent authority as defined in point (2) of Article 2 of Council Regulation (EU) No 1024/2013 ( 2 ) and, for the purposes of this Decision, also includes, in respect of the supervisory tasks assigned to them, national central banks that have been assigned certain supervisory tasks under national law and are not designated as NCAs;

‘cooperating authority’ means a public authority, other than a central bank within the ESCB or a competent authority, with which the ESCB or the Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM) cooperates in carrying out the tasks of the ESCB or of the ECB under Regulation (EU) No 1024/2013;

‘participating competent authority’ means a competent authority that uses the ESCB services for the purpose of cooperating with the ESCB and with other competent authorities, in order to carry out its tasks within the Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM), established pursuant to Regulation (EU) No 1024/2013.

verifies the validity, suspension or revocation of the certificate using current revocation status information;

takes account of any limitations on use specified in the certificate; and

accepts the ESCB-PKI certification practice statement and the applicable ESCB-PKI certificate policies.