Getting Started with IBM Digital Certificate Manager

AS/400 security features are among the best in the world. However, even AS/400 needs additional security to protect the resources it provides when it delivers services to, or uses services from, the Internet. You can use Digital Certificate Manager (DCM) to augment AS/400 security by configuring your system to use digital certificates. Digital certificates allow you to use Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) for secure browser access to Web sites and other Internet services.

DCM allows you to create your own local (intranet) Certificate Authority (CA). You can then use the CA to dynamically issue digital certificates to systems and users on your intranet. When DCM creates a certficate for a CA or for a system, it automatically generates the public key and private key for the certificate.

You can also use DCM to register and use digital certificates from VeriSign or other commercial Certificate Authorities on your intranet or the Internet.

Digital Certificate Manager automatically associates a user certificate that was created by the local CA with the owner's AS/400 user profile. Consequently, the certificate has the same authorizations and permissions as the associated profile.

You can further augment system security by using digital certificates (instead of user names and passwords) to authenticate and authorize sessions between the server and users. You can also use the keys associated with the certificates to "sign" and to encrypt data, such as messages and documents, sent between users and servers. Such digital signatures ensure the reliability of an item's origin and protect the integrity of the item.

If you want to get started with certficate tasks immediately, go directly to these pages:

• Deciding whether to use digital certificates provides more information on the using digital certificates as a part of your security plan.
• Setting up your system to use digital certificates provides the information that you need to prepare your AS/400 system for using DCM.
• Starting Digital Certificate Manager provides information to allow you to start using DCM.

If you want to begin the tasks now, go directly to the following pages.

• Using Internet certificates versus creating your own.
• Examples for using public versus private digital certificates.
• Acting as your own CA.
• Using an Internet CA to issue certificates.
• Creating and exporting a local CA to another system

If you want to use DCM in V4R5 to manage certificates from a prior release of DCM, you need to perform some special tasks. Migrating from a previous version of DCM to version V4R5 provides you with the information that you need to successfully upgrade from your previous version of DCM.