Creating a client certificate

This procedure uses the Workbench Certificate Management tool rather than the station's certificate stores to generate a client certificate for client certificate authentication. By generating the certificate this way, the certificate resides in the Workbench stores.

  • You have the required authority to create certificates.

  • You are running Workbench on your PC.

Note: Those end users who do not have Workbench will need to use some other tool (for example, OpenSSL) to generate a client certificate.
  1. In Workbench, click Tools > Certificate Management.
  2. Click the New button at the bottom of the view.
    The Generate Self Signed Certificate window opens.

  3. Give the certificate at least the required informationAlias, Common Name(CN), Organization, and Country Code.

    • Use Alias to identify this as a client certificate.

    • Entering your station username in the Common Name property facilitates later authentication on the station.

    • The two-character Country Code is required and must be a known value, such as: US, IN, CA, FR, DE, ES, etc. (refer to the ISO CODE column at countrycode.org).

  4. For Certificate Usage, select Client.
  5. When you have filled in the required fields, click OK.
    The system submits the certificate for processing in the background. A pop-up window in the lower right portion of your screen advises you regarding the time it may take to generate the certificate. The length of time it takes depends on the key size and the platform’s processing capability.

    When created, the certificate appears as a new row in the User Key Store table.



The next part of the workflow is to export this client certificate in two different formats: public and private.