Installation guide

104
C:\Program
Files\Tenable\Nessus\
nessus\CA\servercert.
pem
This is the public
certificate for the Nessus
server that is sent in
response to a CSR.
C:\Program Files\Tenable\Nessus\nessus\CA\
on any additional Nessus servers that need to
authenticate using SSL.
C:\Program
Files\Tenable\Nessus\
nessus\CA\cakey.pem
This is the private key of
the Certificate Authority. It
may or may not be
provided by the Certificate
Authority, depending on if
they allow the creation of
sub users.
C:\Program Files\Tenable\Nessus\nessus\CA\
on any additional Nessus servers that need to
authenticate using SSL.
C:\Program
Files\Tenable\Nessus\
nessus\CA\serverkey.p
em
This is the private key of
the Nessus server.
C:\Program Files\Tenable\Nessus\nessus\CA\
on any additional Nessus servers that need to
authenticate using SSL.
Nessus Client Keys
The Nessus user, which in this case is the user ID that SecurityCenter uses to communicate with the Nessus server, is
created by the nessus-mkcert-client.exe executable located in C:\Program Files\Tenable\Nessus.
This command creates the keys for the Nessus clients and optionally registers them appropriately with the Nessus server
by associating a distinguished name (dname) with the user ID. It is important to respond “y” (yes) when prompted to
register the user with the Nessus server for this to take effect. The user name may vary and is referred to here as “user”.
The certificate filename will be a concatenation of “cert_”, the user name you entered and “.pem”. Additionally, the key
filename will be a concatenation of “key_”, the user name you entered and “.pem”.
The following files are created by this command:
File Name Created
Purpose
C:\Documents and
Settings\<UserAccount>\Local
Settings\Temp\nessus-
xxxxxxxx\cert_<user>.pem
This is the public certificate for the specified user.
C:\Documents and
Settings\<UserAccount>\Local
Settings\Temp\nessus-
xxxxxxxx\key_<user>.pem
This is the private key for the specified user.
C:\Program
Files\Tenable\Nessus\nessus\
users\<user_name>\auth\dname
This is the distinguished name to be associated with this user. The
distinguished name consists of a number of fields separated by commas in the
following format:
"/C={country}/ST={state}/L={location}/OU={organizational
unit}/O={organization/CN={common name}"
Creating and Deploying SSL Authentication for Nessus
Create Keys and User on Nessus Server
Create the Certificate Authority and Nessus server certificate using the nessus-mkcert.exe executable located in
C:\Program Files\Tenable\Nessus as follows: