13

Certificate Screen

13.1 Overview

This chapter describes how your NWA can use certificates as a means of authenticating wireless clients. It gives background information about public-key certificates and explains how to use them.

A certificate contains the certificate owner’s identity and public key. Certificates provide a way to exchange public keys for use in authentication.

Figure 58 Certificates Example

In the figure above, the NWA (Z) checks the identity of the notebook (A) using a certificate before granting access to the network.

13.2 What You Can Do in this Chapter

Use the CERTIFICATES > Certificate screen to view, delete and import certificates (seen Section

13.4on page 120).

13.3What You Need To Know

The certification authority certificate that you can import to your NWA should be in PFX PKCS#12 file format. This format referred to as the Personal Information Exchange Syntax Standard is comprised of a private key-public certificate pair that is further encrypted with a password. Before you import a certificate into the NWA, you should verify that you have the correct certificate.

Key distribution is simple and very secure since you can freely distribute public keys and you never need to transmit private keys.

 

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