Federation Guides › Legacy Federation Guide › Key and Certificate Management for Federation

Key and Certificate Management for Federation

In a federation environment, SiteMinder uses a key/certificate pair and standalone certificates for a number of functions:

• Signing/verification of assertions
• Signing/verification of authentication requests (SAML 2.0 only)
• Signing/verification of single logout requests and responses (SAML 2.0 only)
• Encryption/decryption of an entire assertion or part of an assertion (SAML 2.0)
• Client credentials across the back channel for artifact single sign–on

The Policy Server Configuration Guide contains overview information and instructions about managing keys and certificates for SiteMinder.

You can use SSL server certificates to do the following tasks:

• Manage federation traffic across an SSL connection.
• Secure communication across the back channel for artifact single sign-on.

Refer to instructions for enabling SSL for the web server where you have installed the SiteMinder Web Agent.

Note: If you enable SSL, it affects all URLs for all services, even the Base URL parameter. This means that all service URLs must begin with https://.