About This Guide; Recommended Concepts; What Is In This Guide - Red Hat CERTIFICATE SYSTEM 8.0 - ADMINISTRATION Admin Manual

About This Guide

This guide explains how to install, configure, and maintain the Red Hat Certificate System and how to
use it for issuing and managing certificates to end entities such as web browsers, users, servers, and
virtual private network (VPN) clients.
This guide is intended for experienced system administrators planning to deploy the Certificate
System. Certificate System agents should refer to the Certificate System Agent's Guide for information
on how to perform agent tasks, such as handling certificate requests and revoking certificates.

1. Recommended Concepts

Before reading this guide, be familiar with the following concepts:
• Intranet, extranet, and Internet security and the role of digital certificates in a secure enterprise,
including the following topics:
• Encryption and decryption
• Public keys, private keys, and symmetric keys
• Significance of key lengths
• Digital signatures
• Digital certificates, including different types of digital certificates
• The role of digital certificates in a public-key infrastructure (PKI)
• Certificate hierarchies
• LDAP and Red Hat Directory Server
• Public-key cryptography and the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol, including the following:
• SSL cipher suites
• The purpose of and major steps in the SSL handshake

2. What Is in This Guide

Administering certificates relates to the setup and configuration of the individual subsystems, the
processes for issuing certificates, and the ways certificates are stored (in software databases or in
tokens). This administration guide, then, is divided into several functional areas, listed in
"Content Overview".
Concept
Overviews of important concepts
Issuing certificates
Managing certificates on tokens
Table 1,
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