l its elements.</p>

<h1 id="NOTES">NOTES</h1>

<p>The function X509_up_ref() if useful if a certificate structure is being used by several different operations each of which will free it up after use: this avoids the need to duplicate the entire certificate structure.</p>

<p>The function X509_chain_up_ref() doesn&#39;t just up the reference count of each certificate. It also returns a copy of the stack, using sk_X509_dup(), but it serves a similar purpose: the returned chain persists after the original ha