Ssl Infrastructure; A Brief Introduction To Ssl - Red Hat NETWORK 4.0.5 - CLIENT Configuration Manual

SSL Infrastructure

For Red Hat Network customers, security concerns are of the utmost importance. One of
the strengths of Red Hat Network is its ability to process every single request over Secure
Sockets Layer, or SSL. To maintain this level of security, customers installing Red Hat
Network within their infrastructures must generate custom SSL keys and certificates.
Manual creation and deployment of SSL keys and certificates can be quite involved. Both
the RHN Proxy Server and the RHN Satellite Server allow you to build your own SSL keys
and certificates based on your own private Certificate Authority (CA) during installation.
In addition, a separate command line utility, the RHN SSL Maintenance Tool, exists for
this purpose. Regardless, these keys and certificates must then be deployed to all systems
within your managed infrastructure. In many cases, deployment of these SSL keys and
certificates is automated for you. This chapter describes efficient methods for conducting
all of these tasks.
Please note that this chapter does not explain SSL in depth. The RHN SSL Maintenance
Tool was designed to hide much of the complexity involved in setting up and maintain-
ing this public-key infrastructure (PKI). For more information, please consult some of the
many good references available at your nearest bookstore.

3.1. A Brief Introduction To SSL

SSL, or Secure Sockets Layer, is a protocol that enables client-server applications to pass
information securely. SSL uses a system of public and private key pairs to encrypt com-
munication passed between clients and servers. Public certificates can be left accessible,
while private keys must be secured. It's the mathematical relationship (a digital signature)
between a private key and its paired public certificate that makes this system work. Through
this relationship, a connection of trust is established.
Note
Throughout this document we discuss SSL private keys and public certificates. Techni-
cally both can be referred to as keys (public and private keys). But it is convention, when
discussing SSL, to refer to the public half of an SSL key pair (or key set) as the SSL public
certificate.
An organization's SSL infrastructure is generally made up of these SSL keys and certifi-
cates:
Chapter 3.