Understanding The Certificates Screen - NETGEAR SRX5308 - ProSafe® Quad WAN Gigabit SSL VPN Firewall Reference Manual

ProSafe Gigabit Quad WAN SSL VPN Firewall SRX5308 Reference Manual
You can obtain a digital certificate from a well-known commercial certificate authority (CA) such
as Verisign or Thawte, or you can generate and sign your own digital certificate. Because a
commercial CA takes steps to verify the identity of an applicant, a digital certificate from a
commercial CA provides a strong assurance of the server's identity. A self-signed digital
certificate triggers a warning from most browsers because it provides no protection against identity
theft of the server.
The VPN firewall contains a self-signed digital certificate from NETGEAR. This certificate can be
downloaded from the VPN firewall login screen for browser import. However, NETGEAR
recommends that you replace this digital certificate with a digital certificate from a well-known
commercial CA prior to deploying the VPN firewall in your network.

Understanding the Certificates Screen

To display the Certificates screen, select VPN > Certificates from the menu. Because of the large
size of this screen, and because of the way the information is presented, the Certificates screen is
divided and presented in this manual in three figures
page 7-21, and Figure 7-15 on page
The Certificates screen lets you to view the currently loaded digital certificates, upload a new
digital certificate, and generate a Certificate Signing Request (CSR). The VPN firewall typically
holds two types of digital certificates:
• CA digital certificates. Each CA issues its own CA identity digital certificate to validate
communication with the CA and to verify the validity of digital certificates that are signed by
the CA.
• Self digital certificates. The digital certificates that are issued to you by a CA to identify your
device.
The Certificates screen contains four tables that are explained in detail in the following sections:
• Trusted Certificates (CA Certificate) table. Contains the trusted digital certificates that were
issued by CAs and that you uploaded (see
• Active Self Certificates table. Contains the digital self certificates that were issued by CAs
and that you uploaded (see
• Self Certificate Requests table. Contains the self certificate requests that you generated.
These requests might or might not have been submitted to CAs, and CAs might or might not
have issued digital certificates for these requests. Only the digital self certificates in the Active
Self Certificates table are active on the VPN firewall (see
page 7-20).
7-18
(Figure 7-11 on page
7-25).
"Managing Self Certificates" on page
"Managing Self Certificates" on page
Managing Users, Authentication, and Certificates
v1.0, April 2010
7-19, Figure 7-13 on
7-20).
"Managing Self Certificates" on
7-20).