Using the Certification Process

In this section we show hw to use the facilities of the IBM Internet Connection Secure Server and Secure WebExplorer to create requests to be certified by a certifying authority and how to sign your own certificates for testing purposes.

We also discuss the steps needed to set yourself up as a restricted certifying authority. This facility is a useful choice when you are testing or working within a limited environment. For example, you may wan to have a restricted CA for communications within an enterprise. We are not suggesting that you set yourself up as a full-blown public certifying authority. If that is what you plan to do, you should seek legal advice because the liabilities involved are not well defined.

The IBM Internet Connection secure family of products gives you two ways to perform certificate and key management:

On the server, using the administration and configuration HTML forms. You do not need Secure WebExplorer to use these forms, any Web browser will work.
On the Secure WebExplorer browser, using the key management application.

In general you can perform any of the functions that you need using dither technique. The browser key management application allows you to look at the contents of keys more easily, and it does not suffer from some of the dialog limitations that HTML forms impose. In the following examples we will make use of both techniques.