Red Hat Certificate System 7.3 supports a stand-alone Registration Authority (RA), which supports the automatic issue of certificates to devices and servers.

The RA subsystem is a front-end subsystem to the Certificate Authority (CA), and it performs local authentication, requestor information gathering and request validation. It is responsibile for fowarding requests to the CA for signing.

The RA can be configured to authenticate incoming requests, or to route the request to appropriate personnel for approval before forwarding the request to the CA for certificate creation. The RA is typically set up outside of the firewall, while the CA is behind the firewall.