About This Guide; Who Should Read This Guide; Required Concepts; What Is In This Guide - Red Hat CERTIFICATE SYSTEM 7.2 - AGENT GUIDE Manual

About This Guide

This guide describes the agent services interfaces used by Red Hat Certificate System agents to administer subsystem cer-
tificates and keys and other management operations.

1. Who Should Read This Guide

This guide is intended for Certificate System agents, privileged users designated by the Certificate System administrator to
manage requests from end entities for certificate-related services. Each installed Certificate System subsystem # Certificate
Manager, Data Recovery Manager (DRM), Online Certificate Status Manager, Token Key Service (TKS), and Token Pro-
cessing System (TPS) # can have multiple agents.

2. Required Concepts

Before reading this guide, be familiar with the basic concepts of public-key cryptography and the Secure Sockets Layer
(SSL) protocol, including the following topics:
• Encryption and decryption
• Public keys, private keys, and symmetric keys
• Digital signatures
• The role of digital certificates in a public-key infrastructure (PKI)
• Certificate hierarchies
• SSL cipher suites
• The purpose of and major steps in the SSL handshake

3. What Is in This Guide

This guide describes the duties of the agents for the different Certificate System subsystems and explains basic usage and
tasks.
Chapter 1, Agent Services
Chapter 2, CA: Working with Certificate Profiles
Chapter 3, CA: Handling Certificate Requests
Chapter 4, CA: Finding and Revoking Certificates
Chapter 5, CA: Publishing to a Directory
Chapter 6, DRM: Recovering Encrypted Data
Chapter 7, OCSP: Agent Services
Chapter 8, TPS: Agent Services
Table 1. List of Chapters

4. Conventions Used in This Guide

The following conventions are used in this guide:
• Monospaced font is used for any text that appears on the computer screen, commands that the user inputs, file-
names, functions, and examples. For example:
vi