Test Certificates?

[Ryan McBride]

On Wed, Dec 20, 2000 at 01:52:55PM -0600, James Russell wrote:

> Some cohorts and myself have just purchased copies of Safenet's SoftPk VPN
> Windows2000 client for securing our connections to one another.  It was so
> amazingly easy to get everything up and running using fixed keys that I'm
> now considering trying to use certificates because I know they're more
> secure.

They're not necessarily more secure than using fixed keys - they're
one way to handle the problem of key management, but the're definately
not a panacea.

> I know I should probably leave well enough alone, but does anyone know of a
> Certificate Authority where I can just get testing or temporary certificates
> to see if I can get them working?  The Certificate Manager on the client
> looks easy enough, so I'd like to give it a shot.

I've had good experiences using OpenSSL (on OpenBSD) to generate x509
certificates for use with the SafeNet client. If you have access to a
Unix system that you can install OpenSSL on, you can generate all the
certificates you like.

-Ryan

--
Ryan McBride - mcbride at countersiege.com
Systems Security Consultant
Countersiege Systems Corporation - http://www.countersiege.com

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