Requesting a certificate manually – H3C Technologies H3C WX6000 Series Access Controllers User Manual
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Auto: In auto mode, an entity automatically requests a certificate through the Simple Certification
Enrollment Protocol (SCEP) when it has no local certificate or the present certificate is about to
expire.
You can specify the PKI certificate request mode for a PKI domain. Different PKI certificate request
modes require different configurations:
Requesting a certificate manually
Perform the tasks in
to request a certificate manually.
Table 41-1 Configuration task list for requesting a certificate manually
Task
Remarks
Required
Create a PKI entity and configure the identity information.
A certificate is the binding of a public key and an entity, where an entity is the collection
of the identity information of a user. A CA identifies a certificate applicant by entity.
The identity settings of an entity must be compliant to the CA certificate issue policy.
Otherwise, the certificate request may be rejected.
Required
Create a PKI domain, setting the certificate request mode to Manual.
Before requesting a PKI certificate, an entity needs to be configured with some
enrollment information, which is referred to as a PKI domain.
A PKI domain is intended only for convenience of reference by other applications like
IKE and SSL, and has only local significance.
Required
Generate a local RSA key pair.
By default, no local RSA key pair exists.
Generating an RSA key pair is an important step in certificate request. The key pair
includes a public key and a private key. The private key is kept by the user, while the
public key is transferred to the CA along with some other information.
If there is already a local certificate, you need to remove the certificate before
generating a new key pair, so as to keep the consistency between the key pair and the
local certificate.
Retrieving the CA
certificate
Required
Certificate retrieval serves two purposes:
Locally store the certificates associated with the local security domain for improved
query efficiency and reduced query count,
Prepare for certificate verification.
If there are already CA certificates locally, you cannot perform the CA certificate
retrieval operation. This is to avoid possible mismatch between certificates and
registration information resulting from relevant changes. To retrieve the CA certificate,
you need to remove the CA certificate and local certificate first.