Difference between Fabric CA server and CA Client

Question

What are the functions of the Fabric CA Server and Fabric CA Client?

What are the Roles of the Fabric CA Server and Fabric CA Client?

Thanks

Answer 1

Fabric CA provides features such as:

1. Registration of identities with roles like peer, user or application, or connects to an existing LDAP as the user registry to fetch identities of the mentioned roles.
2. Issuance of Enrollment Certificates (ECerts) for signing and identifying
3. Issuance of Transaction Certificates (TCerts), providing both anonymity and unlinkability when transacting on a Hyperledger Fabric blockchain (not yet available in v1.0)
4. Certificate renewal (by re-enrollment) and revocation (using Certificate Revocation Lists feature of PKI)

You need to setup the Fabric CA server to host one or more Certification Authorities (Fabric CA) for your Fabric Network (based on the MSPs What is the difference between MSP and Fabric CA?) using the following Command Line Options:

http://hyperledger-fabric-ca.readthedocs.io/en/latest/servercli.html

The client is just the component that provides an interface to the server component. However, you can skip using the fabric-ca-client and use the REST API of the Fabric Server and do all the functionalities mentioned above. The fabric-ca-client is just a nice wrapper to the ugly REST calls.

You can explore the functionalities of the Fabric CA client using either one of the following:

1. REST API (https://github.com/hyperledger/fabric-ca/blob/master/swagger/swagger-fabric-ca.json)
2. http://hyperledger-fabric-ca.readthedocs.io/en/latest/clientcli.html
3. Fabric CA SDK Clients (Node, Java, etc) for the language you are developing your app in.