In computer networking, a wildcard certificate is a public key certificate which can be used with multiple sub-domains of a domain. The principal use is for securing web sites with HTTPS, but there are also applications in many other fields. Compared with conventional certificates, a wildcard certificate can be cheaper and more convenient than a certificate for each sub-domain. Multi-domain wildcard certificates further simplify the complexity and reduce costs by securing multiple domains and their sub-domains. wikipedia 