Delegated Path Validation (DPV) is a method for offloading to a trusted server the work involved in validating a public key certificate

Public key certificate

In cryptography, a public key certificate is an electronic document which uses a digital signature to bind a public key with an identity — information such as the name of a person or an organization, their address, and so forth...

.

Combining certificate information supplied by the DPV client

Client (computing)

A client is an application or system that accesses a service made available by a server. The server is often on another computer system, in which case the client accesses the service by way of a network....

 with certificate path and revocation status information obtained by itself, a DPV server

Server (computing)

In the context of client-server architecture, a server is a computer program running to serve the requests of other programs, the "clients". Thus, the "server" performs some computational task on behalf of "clients"...

is able to apply complex validation policies that are prohibitive for each client to perform.

The requirements for DPV are described in RFC 3379.