PGP certificates

Using PGP certificates is similar to using X.509 certificates, but there are some important distinctions.

PGP certificates can be used only with FTP or SFTP to exchange messages with remote partners. Special FTP and SFTP delivery exchanges for PGP must be used.

• PGP certificates only are used to sign and encrypt or decrypt messages. Any certificates used to make secure connections (for example, SSL) are X.509 certificates.
• Most of the user interface dedicated to certificate management deals with X.509 and not PGP certificates. Look for links or labels that reference PGP explicitly.
• By the same token, most of the topics about certificates in this documentation relate to X.509 certificates. Look for topics that reference PGP explicitly.

Activator lets you generate self-signed PGP certificates in the user interface. You also can import PGP certificates that have been generated by a third-party external PGP tool or sent to you by remote partners. When PGP certificates for encrypting and signing messages have been added to a community, the public keys and certificates are included when the profile is exported as a partner profile. You can give such profile files to remote partners who also use Activator. A community’s certificates also can be exported to files manually and given to partners. In short, the user interface provides similar usability features for PGP certificates as for X.509 certificates.

To read the PGP specification RFC 2440 go to http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2440.txt.

Related topics

• PGP secure trading
• Add a PGP pickup or delivery
• Manage PGP certificates
• PGP collaboration settings