Certificate Wizard

The latest Niagara version supports a Certificate Wizard. This wizard, available as a view on the platform root, provides a complete, continuous workflow that helps you properly set up certificates to harden a platform and station against cyber attack.

The wizard assumes prior experience in various types of certificate setup and a reasonable level of confidence in performing such procedures as are commonly done using the Certificate Management tool. That being the case, you will find that the Certificate Wizard simplifies the certificate setup process for a station by combining several steps into a continuous workflow. If you are unfamiliar with certificates, work through individual setup procedures using the Certificate Management tool as described elsewhere in this guide. The individual procedures will help you gain a better understanding of the steps involved.

Figure 1. Certificate Wizard platform tool with default selections


As an alternative to using the Certificate Management tabs to create and install a CA root certificate, the Certificate Wizard generates the root CA certificate and exports it with only its public key in preparation to install in a browser.

Note: The Certificate Wizard is intended to be used for a single platform at a time, not for provisioning multiple platforms.

The Certificate Wizard may be configured to perform some or all of the following tasks:

  • Generate a new root CA certificate on the local host that can be used to sign all server certificates.

  • Generate a new server certificate for a host platform.

  • Sign a server certificate with a new or existing root CA certificate.

  • Export a server certificate CSR (signing request) for signing by an external certificate authority.

  • Install a root CA certificate into the User Trust Store of a platform/station selected from the daemon directory.

Once the Certificate Wizard generates the files, they must still be installed into all of the appropriate devices. This is accomplished via the Certificate Management tool found in the Workbench Tools menu.