About Certificates

ASx protocols use certificates to sign and encrypt files. Digital certificates are also known as X.509 certificates, web certifictes, and client certificates.

What are certificates?

All digital certificates are made up a public key, a private key and additional information such as common name (CN). Certificates can be distributed with or without their private key, but in most situations you should NOT distribute certs containing your private key.

Many digital certificates are signed by other certificate authority (CA) certificates. This allows people and computers that trust the certificate authorities to trust, use and allow certificates signed by the certificate authorities.

For more information, see SSL Client Certificates.

Where do you get a certificate?

Certificates without private keys are usually delivered to you by your trading partners. You can import these certificates into MOVEit Automation.

A certificate with a private key can be obtained by any of the following methods:

• Purchase a commercial client certificate from Thawte, Verisign or one of the many other commercial CA vendors. This option is useful if your AS partners requiretrusted CAs as well as specific certificates in AS transactions. These certificates are also known as email certificates because they can also be used with SMIME-encrypted email.)
• Get a new certificate from your corporate CA. If your company is already issuing client certificates and acting as its own CA, your certificate group can provide certificate and instructions for using it.
• Obtain a certificate (with private key) from your partner. Some partners will deliver a *.pfx or other format certificate-with-private-key file before you start trading. You import the certificate into MOVEit Automation. To do so, you need the password.
• Create your own certificate.