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Digital Certificate Authentication

A digital certificate is a digital document that includes the public key bound to an individual, organization, or machine. Certificates are issued by certificate authorities (CAs) who have documented policies for determining owner identity and distributing certificates.

X.509 digital certificate authentication is a standards-based security framework that is used to secure private information and transaction processing. Certificates are exchanged in a manner that makes sure the presenter of a certificate possesses the private-key associated with the public-key contained in the certificate.

Siebel Systems supports X.509 digital certificate authentication by the Web server. The Web server performs the digital certificate authentication and the Siebel application accepts the authentication result in the form of Web SSO.

For customers who have an existing PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) with client certificates, Siebel Systems supports the use of X.509 certificates to authenticate users to an application. This is accomplished by using SSL with client authentication capabilities of its supported Web servers for certificate handling.

To implement X.509 digital certificate authentication, you must perform the tasks for implementing Web SSO authentication, as described in Implementing Web SSO Authentication, with the following specific guidelines:

• Enter the following parameters in the [defaults] section of the eapps.cfg file:

  Parameter	Comment
  SingleSignOn = TRUE
  TrustToken = HELLO
  ClientCertificate = TRUE
  UserSpec = CERT_SUBJECT or REMOTE_USER	For client authentication on Windows and AIX, use CERT_SUBJECT. For other UNIX platforms, use REMOTE_USER.
  SubUserSpec = CN	This parameter value tells the application to extract the username from the certificate name. For the Sun Java System Web Server, this setting is ignored.
  UserSpecSource = Server

• In the configuration file for each affected application, such as eservice.cfg, enter the following parameters in the section indicated:

  [SWE]
  SecureBrowse = FALSE

• For each security adapter (such as LDAPSecAdpt) that is to support certificate-based authentication, define the following parameter values:

  SingleSignOn = TRUE
  TrustToken = HELLO

For additional information about digital certificate implementation, see Certificate-Based Authentication and Its Application in Siebel 7, available on Siebel SupportWeb.