Certificate Screen; Chapter 13 Certificate Screen; Overview; What You Can Do In This Chapter - ZyXEL Communications NWA-1100 Manual

13.1 Overview

This chapter describes how your NWA can use certificates as a means of authenticating wireless
clients. It gives background information about public-key certificates and explains how to use them.
A certificate contains the certificate owner's identity and public key. Certificates provide a way to
exchange public keys for use in authentication.
Figure 58 Certificates Example
In the figure above, the NWA (Z) checks the identity of the notebook (A) using a certificate before
granting access to the network.

13.2 What You Can Do in this Chapter

Use the CERTIFICATES > Certificate screen to view, delete and import certificates (seen
13.4 on page

13.3 What You Need To Know

The certification authority certificate that you can import to your NWA should be in PFX PKCS#12
file format. This format referred to as the Personal Information Exchange Syntax Standard is
comprised of a private key-public certificate pair that is further encrypted with a password. Before
you import a certificate into the NWA, you should verify that you have the correct certificate.
Key distribution is simple and very secure since you can freely distribute public keys and you never
need to transmit private keys.
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