More and more organizations are setting up their own internal PKIs. When these independent PKIs need to interconnect to allow for secure communication to take place (either between departments or different companies), there must be a way for the two root CAs to trust each other.

These two CAs do not have a CA above them they can both trust, so they must carry out cross certification. A cross certification is the process undertaken by CAs to establish a trust relationship in which they rely upon each other's digital certificates and public keys as if they had issued them themselves.

When this is set up, a CA for one company can validate digital certificates from the other company and vice versa.

Reference(s) used for this question:

For more information and illustration on Cross certification: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/windowsserver2003/technologies/security/ws03qswp.mspx http://www.entrust.com/resources/pdf/cross_certification.pdf

also see:

Shon Harris, CISSP All in one book, 4th Edition, Page 727

and

RFC 2459: Internet X.509 Public Key Infrastructure Certificate and CRL Profile; FORD, Warwick & BAUM, Michael S., Secure Electronic Commerce: Building the Infrastructure for Digital Signatures and Encryption (2nd Edition), 2000, Prentice Hall PTR, Page 254.