The Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP) Manager is an optional PKI
subsystem that can act as a stand-alone OCSP service. The OCSP Manager
performs the task of an online certificate validation authority by enabling
OCSP-compliant clients to do real-time verification of certificates. Note
that an online certificate-validation authority is often referred to as an
OCSP Responder.
Although the Certificate Authority (CA) is already configured with an
internal OCSP service. An external OCSP Responder is offered as a separate
subsystem in case the user wants the OCSP service provided outside of a
firewall while the CA resides inside of a firewall, or to take the load of
requests off of the CA.
The OCSP Manager can receive Certificate Revocation Lists (CRLs) from
multiple CA servers, and clients can query the OCSP Manager for the
revocation status of certificates issued by all of these CA servers.
When an instance of OCSP Manager is set up with an instance of CA, and
publishing is set up to this OCSP Manager, CRLs are published to it
whenever they are issued or updated.
