This article provides an overview of the officers, roles, and officer profiles in Smart ID Certificate Manager (CM).
Certificate Manager users are known as officers. CM enables configuration of officer roles on a fine-grained level for restricting officers to perform specific tasks only, for example as prescribed by the CA operational policies.
To simplify the administration of officers, officer profiles are configured to predefine a number of permitted roles and other constraints. A unique officer is then created by associating an officer profile either to a certificate issued by CM, to a system unique subject, or to a token serial number.
The following general officer types are available, to separate administrative from operational duties and for establishing a secure connection from client to server:
- Administration officers
- Registration officers
The available roles for each officer type are listed below.
Administration Officers are responsible for administrating security policies, setting up CA Policies, auditing, and so on, whereas Registration Officers are responsible for registering users, issuing certificates, and so on.
Administration officer roles
Administration officers are responsible for administering the security policies of CM, for example setting up CA policies and auditing. The following administration roles are available in the Administrator's workbench (AWB) client:
- Use AWB
- Manual build of CRL and CIL
- CA and Key tasks
- Policy tasks
- Officer tasks
- Domain tasks
- Profile tasks
- Audit tasks
- Configuration tasks
Registration officer roles
Registration officers are responsible for tasks such as registering users and issuing, activating, and revoking certificates. Registration officers work in the Certificate Manager clients: Registration Authority (RA), Certificate Controller (CC) and Secure Printer (SP).
The following roles are available:
- Use clients
- Issue certificate
- Revoke certificate
- Revoke certificate with password
- Issue attribute certificate
- Revoke attribute certificate
- Revoke attribute certificate with password
- Publish certificate
- Republish failed distribution
- Create batch
- Claim batch
- Manage PIN letters
- Manage revocation password
- Manage user data retention
- Manage OCSP Activation
- Recover key
- Export search results
Authentication officer roles
Authentication officers have restricted rights, not permitting an unattended service to do other tasks than establishing the TLS connection between the client application and the CM server, listing of certificates, and the forwarding of certification requests signed by a registration officer.
The following role is available:
Read-only officer roles
Read-only officers access is restricted to viewing inside the AWB client. They cannot perform operations such as manual building of CRLs and CILs, configuring CA Policies or auditing. This officer type has only the Use AWB role:
Supplementary roles
It is also possible to define supplementary roles. These customer specific roles will appear in the list of available roles only if this feature has been configured. CM SDK is required to make use of supplementary roles. See the Developer's Guide for more details.
Additional constraints
In addition to the roles, there are several other constraints that can be used to limit officer permissions, for example that an officer is only allowed to handle specific CAs, CA policies, and certificate content, for example only certificates for a certain organization.
