Federation Manager Guide › Key and Certificate Management to Secure Federation Messages › Obtain a Key/Certificate Pair for Federated Transactions

Obtain a Key/Certificate Pair for Federated Transactions

Federation Manager uses a key/certificate pair and trusted certificates for a number of functions. For Federation Manager to perform tasks that use keys and certificates, these items must be in the certificate data store.

If you do not have a key/certificate pair in the certificate data store, you have two options:

• Import a key/certificate pair from an existing file (.p12 or .pfx).
• Generate a key/certificate pair.

  To generate a new key/certificate pair, request a certificate from a trusted Certificate Authority and then import the signed certificate response that the authority returns.

The following figure shows the steps for each method of obtaining a key/certificate pair or trusted certificate.