Until recently it was not possible to protect the control file repository against unauthorized access via HTTP. Configuring the Web server for certificate-based client authentication prevented AutoYaST from accessing this repository.
Since SLES 11 SP2, AutoYaST does support certificate-based authentication. For this purpose, a public key and private key generated by the CA that created the certificate used by the Web server must be inserted into /etc/ssl/clientcerts on the initrd of the boot medium. The keys must be named client-cert.pem for the public key and client-key.pem for the private key.
For more information, see Novell Support TID 3909888, “How to modify or customize the installation initrd”.