How to Implement CA Root

[Former Member]

We have a great deal of external web services which we call from SAP via HTTPS. As consumers of the service, each time their certificate expires we have to wait until the provider renews it and re-import it. If we do not do this and the certificate expires we get SSL errors.

But surely SAP supports the idea of a CA Root? In that case we would only need to manage the certificate of the CA Roots (e.g. Verisign, Thawte etc.) and all signed certificates would be trusted. Is there a guide on how to implement this?

[Former Member]

The problem of expiring certificates exists regardless whether CA roots are stored in the SAP system or not. The reason being that the certificates of your providers also expire, regardless of the expiration of the CA roots. See the attached link for the only official document I'm aware of that talks about the issue, the topic being NWSSO however.

http://scn.sap.com/community/netweaver-sso/blog/2013/09/30/change-root-certificate-in-secure-login-s...

[Former Member]

Thanks. The problem is still there but it is much smaller: instead of managing 20+ certificates expiring at different times (every 3 years) I can manage a handful of CA certs which expire much less often.

[Former Member]

That's incorrect. You will have to trust also the root CAs used to sign the certificates of your providers and since they are not maintained by SAP, as you have found out, you have to manage them too. The document I linked to doesn't provide a solution, it discusses the problem.

[Former Member]

I don't see what you mean by "incorrect". I understand and agree with everything you just wrote: we manage our CA certificates and it's easier than managing individual domain certificates. Perhaps you could explain what you mean by "providers"?

Just to be clear: we are not concerned with issuing certificates but importing certificates of domains for which we consume web services.