A public key plus information about the certificate owner bound together by the digital signature of a CA. In the case of a CA certificate, the certificate is self signed, i.e. it was signed using its own private key.

SOAP provides a standard, extensible, composable framework for packaging and exchanging XML messages between a service provider and a service requester. SOAP is independent of the underlying transport protocol, but is most commonly carried on HTTP. See the SOAP specifications for details.