What does a Digital certificate contain?

If you view a digital certificate using FireFox browser or decoding it using some tool such as OpenSSL/IKeyMan; then we can see the following parts/data:-
- Issued by {The CA name}
- Issued to/Subject {CN of the subject (typically the DNS of the server)}
- Valid From {date}
- Valid Till {date}
- Public Key {typically the 1024 bit public key of the subject}
- Public Key Algorithm {The encryption algorithm to be used with the key, e.g. RSA}
- Signature Algorithm {The algorithm used to generate the digital signature, e.g. MD5HashWithRSA, SHA1HashWithRSA}
- Signature {The digital signature}

The digital signature is created by hashing the public key of the subject using MD5 or SHA1 and then encrypting the hash using the private key of a CA.

An entity verifying this digital cert would:
- decrypt the hash using the public key of the CA
- create a new hash of the public key of the subject
- compare both the hash keys and verify if the subject can be trusted.