Netscape NETSCAPE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM 4.5, Installation And Setup Manual

Page: 34 / 866

Overview of Key Features
34 Netscape Certificate Management System Installation and Setup Guide • October 2001
Overview of Key Features
Certificate Management System has many core features:
Support for open standards
With its support for open standards, Certificate Management System gives
organizations confidence that they will be able to communicate within a
heterogeneous computing environment. Specifically, Certificate Management
System does the following:
• Formulates, signs, and issues industry-standard X.509 version 3 public-key
certificates; version 3 certificates include extensions that make it easy to
include organization-defined attributes. This means that you can use these
certificates for extranet and Internet authentication as well.
For details on setting extensions in certificates, see Chapter 18, “Setting Up
Policies.”
• Supports issuance of Wireless Transport Layer Security (wTLS)-compliant
certificates for use with wireless applications.
• Supports RSA public-key algorithm for signing and encryption, DSA
public-key algorithm for signing, and MD2, MD5, and SHA-1 for hashing.
• Supports signature key lengths of up to 1024 bits (DSA) and 4096 (RSA) on
both hardware and software tokens.
• Supports multiple message formats, such as KEYGEN/SPAC, CRMF/CMMF,
CRS/CEP/SCEP, and PKCS #10 and CMC for certificate requests. All requests
are delivered to Certificate Management System over HTTP or HTTPS; in the
case of CRS/CEP/SCEP protocol, the delivery method is always over HTTP.
For a description of the acronyms, see “Standards Summary” on page 77.
• Supports certificate formats that encompass certificates for SSL-based client
and server authentication, secure Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions
(S/MIME) message signing and encryption, object signing, VPN clients, and
Cisco™ routers.
• Supports generation and publication of CRLs conforming to X.509 version 1
and 2.
• Publishes certificates and certificate revocation lists (CRLs) to the any
LDAP-compliant directory over LDAP and HTTP/HTTPS connections. For
more information, see Chapter 19, “Setting Up LDAP Publishing.
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