Posts tagged cygwin

As more and more programs realise the importance of security many are turning to SSL to secure connections between clients and servers anyone who has spent any time with SSL probably knows that SSL certificates can be quite expensive. However there are times when it simply isn’t necessary to pay for an SSL certificate, there is an alternative, and even better is its free!

In this first guide I will explain how to generate your own Root Certificate and then in the next part I will show how you can then use this Root Certificate to sign your own certificates, the final part of this series will explain how to then deploy the certificate using Group Policy.

This magical alternative is to sign your own SSL certificates, however many people are put off this because of the warnings web browsers generate these days when then encounter a self-signed SSL certificate. For Internal deployments though, self-signed certificates are a perfectly valid option as it is possible to deploy the certificates so users don’t receive any warnings. Of course, even this can get tedious as for each new or renewed certificate you have to ensure this is deployed correctly for all your users, if you have a number of different web pages or web-apps that you want to secure this can quickly create additional work and take up time you could be spending on other things.

Don’t worry though, there is a better option! This is to become your own Root Certificate Authority and then use this to sign your certificates, that way all you need to do is to deploy the one Root Certificate to your users and then any certificate that you sign with it is automatically trusted and no warnings are displayed. This method allows you to secure any number of services or websites using an SSL certificate that you know will be accepted by their browser.

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