Appliance certificates

Communication within BMC Discovery is secured using TLS, and authenticated using certificates.

In the Appliance Certificates section, you can get an overview of the certificates trusted by the system, manage the certificates for this appliance, and view the certificates for the appliances and proxies this appliance communicates with.

Related topics

Secure deployment

Replacing-a-default-Certificate-Authority-bundle

In the Known Certificates section, you can see the details of all the certificates registered with the appliance (Windows proxies, consolidated appliances, and so on). 

Note

  • For an appliance that is a part of a consolidation setup, when you generate a new key and certificates, the appliance immediately exchanges keys and certificates with other members of the consolidation setup. This happens only once, immediately after the first time the legacy key and certificate is replaced with the new ones. 
  • Windows proxies must re-register with the appliance after the appliance generates new keys and certificates.
  • For new installations of BMC Discovery, a unique set of keys is generated automatically.

Navigating to the Appliance Certificates page

To navigate to the Appliance Certificates:

  1. From the main menu, click the Administration icon.  
    The Administration page is displayed.
  2. In the Security section, click Appliance Certificates.

Viewing the appliance key/appliance certificate

To view the appliance key or appliance certificate, click the Show details link next to the Appliance Key or Appliance Certificate fingerprint.

This example shows the Appliance Key details:

ApplianceCerts_New.png

Generating a new key and certificate

If you believe that an appliance key has been compromised, or you want to disable all existing communication with an appliance, you can generate a new key and certificate.

Note

Unless you are switching from the legacy keys to unique ones after an upgrade, generating a new key and certificate will break all existing communication links to other components until the links are re-established manually.

To generate new key and certificate:

  1. On the Appliance Certificates page, click Generate new certificate and key.
  2. When prompted, confirm the action by clicking Yes.
    The offline update page is displayed while the system generates the keys and restarts.
    After the system restarts, the appliance uses the new keys. Any Windows proxies that the system was using must now re-register. For information about how to do this, see Managing-known-appliances. 

Viewing portable CA certificate

On the Appliance Certificates page, click Show portable CA Certificate.

The CA Certificate dialog displays the CA certificate in a portable format (pem) that might be used to manually transfer the certificate to the appliance.

ShowPortableCA_New.png

Viewing known certificates

To view a list of known certificates:

  1. From the main menu, click the Administration icon.
    The     Administration page is displayed.
  2. In the Security section, click Appliance Certificates.

The information fields for a known certificate are arranged in the following groups:

Field name

Details

Type: Name

Name of the registered certificate; usually consists of the type of the registered item and its name (for example, proxy: AD).

Show details/Hide details

Link that expands or collapses the certificate contents.

File

Name of the file on disk that stores the certificate (for example, proxy_AD.pem).

Fingerprint

Certificate fingerprint.

 

Tip: For faster searching, add an asterisk to the end of your partial query. Example: cert*