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Table Of Contents
About Digital Certificates
Clients and the servers to which they connect may hold authentication certificates that validate their identities.
When a client connects to a server for the first time, or the first time since its previous certificate has expired or
been revoked, the server requests that the client transmit its authentication certificate. The client’s certificate is
then verified against the CA which issued it. Clients can also request and verify the server’s authentication
certificate. For some applications, such as 802.1X authentication, clients do not need to validate the server
certificate for the authentication to function.
Digital certificates are issued by a CA which can be either a commercial, third-party company or a private CA
controlled by your organization. The CA is trusted to authenticate the owner of the certificate before issuing a
certificate. A CA-signed certificate guarantees the identity of the certificate holder. This is done by comparing
the digital signature on a client or server certificate to the signature on the certificate for the CA. When CA-
signed certificates are used to authenticate clients, the controller checks the validity of client certificates using
certificate revocation lists (CRLs) maintained by the CA that issued the certificate.
Digital certificates employ public key infrastructure (PKI), which requires a private-public key pair. A digital
certificate is associated with a private key, known only to the certificate owner, and a public key. A certificate
encrypted with a private key is decrypted with its public key. For example, party A encrypts its certificate with
its private key and sends it to party B. Party B decrypts the certificate with party A’s public key.
Obtaining a Server Certificate
Best practices is to replace the default server certificate in the controller with a custom certificate issued for
your site or domain by a trusted CA. To obtain a security certificate for the controller from a CA:
1. Generate a Certificate Signing Request (CSR) on the controller using either the WebUI or CLI.
2. Submit the CSR to a CA. Copy and paste the output of the CSR into an email and send it to the CA of your
choice.
3. The CA returns a signed server certificate and the CA’s certificate and public key.
4. Install the server certificate, as described in
Importing Certificates on page 848.
There can be only one outstanding CSR at a time in the controller. Once you generate a CSR, you need to import the
CA-signed certificate into the controller before you can generate another CSR.
In the WebUI
1. Navigate to the Configuration > Management > Certificates > CSR page.
2. Enter the following information:
Parameter Description Range
CSR Type Type of the CSR.
You can generate a certificate signing request
either with an Elliptic curve (EC) key, or with a
Rivest-Shamir-Aldeman (RSA) key.
ec/rsa
Curve name Length of the private/public key for ECDSA. This is
applicable only if CSR Type is ec.
secp256r1/secp384
r1
Key Length Length of the private/public key for RSA. 1024/2048/4096
Table 187: CSR Parameters
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