User's Manual

Chapter 15 Certificates
P-2612HW Series User’s Guide
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• The ZyXEL Device only has to store the certificates of the certification
authorities that you decide to trust, no matter how many devices you need to
authenticate.
• Key distribution is simple and very secure since you can freely distribute public
keys and you never need to transmit private keys.
Self-signed Certificates
You can have the ZyXEL Device act as a certification authority and sign its own
certificates.
15.1.3 Verifying a Certificate
Before you import a trusted CA or trusted remote host certificate into the ZyXEL
Device, you should verify that you have the actual certificate. This is especially
true of trusted CA certificates since the ZyXEL Device also trusts any valid
certificate signed by any of the imported trusted CA certificates.
You can use a certificate’s fingerprint to verify it. A certificate’s fingerprint is a
message digest calculated using the MD5 or SHA1 algorithms. The following
procedure describes how to check a certificate’s fingerprint to verify that you have
the actual certificate.
1 Browse to where you have the certificate saved on your computer.
2 Make sure that the certificate has a “.cer” or “.crt” file name extension.
Figure 173 Certificates on Your Computer