topic GP client Auth Certification in GlobalProtect Discussions

GP client Auth Certification

suba_muthuram — Thu, 05 Jan 2023 09:09:46 GMT

Hi Team, Do we need to manually install the Client certificate for the Global Protect Certificate authentication or It will automatically fetch from Portal.

Re: GP client Auth Certification

Arnesh — Thu, 05 Jan 2023 09:39:38 GMT

Hi @suba_muthuram

Yes, the certificate should be installed. However, it depends on how to want to deploy the certificates. Below is the snippet from the GlobalProtect Admin-Guide:

For an agent configuration profile that specifies client certificates, each user receives a client certificate. The mechanism for providing the certificates determines whether a certificate is unique to each user or the same for all users under that agent configuration:

• To deploy client certificates that are unique to each user and endpoint, use SCEP. When a user first logs in, the portal requests a certificate from the enterprise’s PKI. The portal obtains a unique certificate and deploys it to the endpoint.
• To deploy the same client certificate to all users that receive an agent configuration, deploy a certificate that is Local to the firewall.

Re: GP client Auth Certification

TomYoung — Thu, 05 Jan 2023 14:04:09 GMT

Hi @suba_muthuram ,

You can manually install the certificate or configure the portal to push the certificate to the client.

The portal configuration to push the certificate is found under Network > GlobalProtect > Portals > [edit portal] > Agent > [edit config] > Authentication > Client Certificate. There are 3 options available: Local, SCEP, and None. These are the options described by @Arnesh above. Please remember to change this setting back to None once the certificate has been distributed to all of your GP clients. Otherwise, there really is no 2FA with certificates, it is pushed every time.

Manual installation can be done by distributing the certificates to the client devices through other means, the most common is MS GPO combined with MS CA server. As @Arnesh described, the certificate can be unique to each user or the same for all users.

Thanks,

Tom