The Certificates pane is used to store certificates locally in Belden Horizon Data Operations.

When your instance of Belden Horizon Data Operations boots up for the first time, a self-signed certificate is automatically created. Because the certificate generated by Belden Horizon Data Operations is self-signed, web browsers detect that the certificate is not formally approved by a certificate authority. That is why you will get browser warnings that the connection is not private/secure. See Browser Access Restrictions for more information.

Despite these warnings, all communication through Belden Horizon Data Operations and Belden Horizon Data Manager is done through https, which means it's encrypted end-to-end and the connection is always secure.

Belden Horizon Data Operations gives you the option to upload certificates and copy device public keys as required by your organization.

A device certificate (or SSL certificate) is a digital certificate that provides proof of the device's identity (Belden Horizon Data Operations instance). If required by your organization, you can replace the self-signed certificate generated by Belden Horizon Data Operations with your own device certificate. When you upload a device certificate, the connection to the device is validated as a secure connection.

For details on uploading a device certificate, see Add a Device Certificate.

You are not required to upload a device certificate for your instance of Belden Horizon Data Operations, but your organization may decide to upload one for the following use cases.

The certificate you upload must be an Nginx certificate.

When uploading a device certificate, you will need to provide the following parameters.

You have the option of using the Reset to self-signed device certificate function for device certificates. This replaces the existing certificate with the automatically generated self-signed one and creates a new expiry date for the certificate.

Before you reset the certificate, verify that any system communicating with Belden Horizon Data Operations will not be negatively affected, as this invalidates all active UI sessions and the receiving of data from external sources.

A CA certificate is a digital certificate issued by a certificate authority (CA). The CA certificate allows valid and secure connections between Belden Horizon Data Operations and other systems. Learn more about certificate authorities from Wikipedia.

To create a valid and secure connection between Belden Horizon Data Operations and Belden Horizon Data Manager, a custom CA certificate needs to be generated. To complete this specific task, see Activate an Edge Device for details.

To upload a custom CA certificate not related to validating communication between Belden Horizon Data Operations and Belden Horizon Data Manager, see Add a Custom CA Certificate.

You can upload custom CA certificates for the following use cases:

The device public key is the Belden Horizon Data Operations system's identity/device footprint. It is not related to certificates. If your organization requires public keys to be accepted, you can copy it from the Identity tab.

Identity certificates are required when a connection between a device (Belden Horizon Data Operations instance) and another service needs to be authenticated. For example, when a connection is set up between Belden Horizon Data Operations and Belden Horizon Data Manager, an identity certificate is created that can be viewed in Belden Horizon Data Operations. Belden Horizon Data Operations can have multiple identity certificates signed by different authorities.

When you create a connection between Belden Horizon Data Operations and Belden Horizon Data Manager, an identity certificate is automatically created that can't be deleted from Belden Horizon Data Operations.

A certificate signing request (CSR) is used to apply for an SSL/TLS certificate. The CSR contains information that the certificate authority will use to create the certificate, such as common name, organization, and country. It also contains the public key that will be included in your certificate and is signed with the corresponding private key.

You can copy/download the certificate signing request in Belden Horizon Data Operations and send it to a certificate authority for authorization. The certificate authority can then send back a signed identity certificate. You can then install this identity certificate in Belden Horizon Data Operations. See Install an Identity Certificate and Manage Certificate Signing Requests for more details.

To access the System Certificates pane: