Certificate; Chapter 12 Certificate; Overview; What You Can Do In This Chapter - ZyXEL Communications P-660H-61 User Manual

12.1 Overview

The ZyXEL Device can use certificates (also called digital IDs) to authenticate users. Certificates are
based on public-private key pairs. A certificate contains the certificate owner's identity and public
key. Certificates provide a way to exchange public keys for use in authentication.

12.1.1 What You Can Do in this Chapter

• The Trusted CA screen lets you save the certificates of trusted CAs to the ZyXEL Device
12.3 on page

12.2 What You Need to Know

The following terms and concepts may help as you read through this chapter.
Certification Authority
A Certification Authority (CA) issues certificates and guarantees the identity of each certificate
owner. There are commercial certification authorities like CyberTrust or VeriSign and government
certification authorities. The certification authority uses its private key to sign certificates. Anyone
can then use the certification authority's public key to verify the certificates. You can use the ZyXEL
Device to generate certification requests that contain identifying information and public keys and
then send the certification requests to a certification authority.
Certificate File Format
The certification authority certificate that you want to import has to be in one of these file formats:
• PEM (Base-64) encoded X.509: This Privacy Enhanced Mail format uses 64 ASCII characters to
convert a binary X.509 certificate into a printable form.

12.3 The Trusted CA Screen

Click Security > Certificates to open the following screen. This screen displays a summary list of
certificates of the certification authorities that you have set the ZyXEL Device to accept as trusted.
The ZyXEL Device accepts any valid certificate signed by a certification authority on this list as
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