Digital Certificate Overview

03/26/2020 27 13147

DESCRIPTION:
Digital Certificate Overview

RESOLUTION:
Services: Digital Signature overview

Feature/Application: Digital Certificates Overview

Digital Certificates Overview:

A digital certificate is an electronic means to verify identity by a trusted third party known as a Certificate Authority (CA). The X.509 v3 certificate standard is a specification to be used with cryptographic certificates and allows you to define extensions which you can include with your certificate. SonicWall has implemented this standard in its third party certificate support.

You can use a certificate signed and verified by a third party CA to use with an IKE (Internet Key Exchange) VPN policy. IKE is an important part of IPsec VPN solutions, and it can use digital certificates to authenticate peer devices before setting up SAs.

Without digital certificates, VPN users must authenticate by manually exchanging shared secrets or symmetric keys. Devices or clients using digital signatures do not require configuration changes every time a new device or client is added to the network.

A typical certificate consists of two sections:

1. Data section
2. Signature section

1. The version of X.509 supported by the certificate
2. A certificate serial number
3. Information about the user’s public key
4. The Distinguished Name (DN)
5. Validation period for the certificate
6. Optional information such as the target use of the certificate.

1. The cryptographic algorithm used by the issuing CA,
2. The CA digital signature.