Chapter 5. Requesting, Enrolling, and Managing Certificates
Certificates are requested and used by end users. Although certificate enrollment and renewal are operations that are not limited to administrators, understanding the enrollment and renewal processes can make it easier for administrators to manage and create appropriate certificate profiles, as described in Section 3.2, “Setting up Certificate Profiles”, and to use fitting authentication methods (described in Chapter 9, Authentication for Enrolling Certificates) for each certificate type.
This chapter discusses requesting, receiving, and renewing certificates for use outside Certificate System. For information on requesting and renewing Certificate System subsystem certificates, see Chapter 16, Managing Subsystem Certificates.
5.1. About Enrolling and Renewing Certificates
Enrollment is the process for requesting and receiving a certificate. The mechanics for the enrollment process are slightly different depending on the type of certificate, the method for generating its key pair, and the method for generating and approving the certificate itself. Whatever the specific method, certificate enrollment, at a high level, has the same basic steps:
- A certificate request (CSR) is generated.
- The certificate request is submitted to the CA.
- The request is verified by authenticating the entity which requested it and by confirming that the request meets the certificate profile rules which were used to submit it.
- The request is approved.
- The requesting party retrieves the new certificate.
When the certificate reaches the end of its validity period, it can be renewed.
