System information

About This Guide
This guide describes the agent services interfaces used by Red Hat Certificate System agents
to administer subsystem certificates and keys and other management operations.
1. Who Should Read This Guide
This guide is intended for Certificate System agents. Agents are privileged users designated by
the Certificate System administrator to manage requests from end entities for certificate-related
services. Each installed Certificate System subsystem; Certificate Manager (CM), Data
Recovery Manager (DRM), Online Certificate Status Manager, Token Key Service (TKS), and
Token Processing System (TPS), can have multiple agents.
2. Required Concepts
Before reading this guide, be familiar with the basic concepts of public-key cryptography and the
Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol, including the following topics:
• Encryption and decryption
• Public keys, private keys, and symmetric keys
• Digital signatures
• The role of digital certificates in a public-key infrastructure (PKI)
• Certificate hierarchies
• SSL cipher suites
• The purpose of and major steps in the SSL handshake
3. What is in This Guide
This guide describes an agent's responsibilities for the different Certificate System subsystems,
and explains basic usage and tasks.
• Chapter 2, Agent Services Provides an overview of the product and identifies different kinds
of users, including agents. The chapter also summarizes the tasks of each subsystem agent,
lists the HTML forms used to perform agent tasks, and explains how to access the agent
services pages and forms.
• Chapter 3, CA: Working with Certificate Profiles Provides an overview of the profiles feature
and details how to enable and disable profiles.
• Chapter 4, CA: Handling Certificate Requests Describes the general procedures for handling
Chapter 1.
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