By Scott LoweThis gallery is also available as a TechRepublic blog post and download.
SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificates are perhaps the most common way to protect information being transmitted between a visitor Web browser and your Web site. SSL provides encryption services to information flowing between systems and can protect Web traffic, e-mail, instant messages and a host of other kinds of data transmittals.
I'm not going to go into great detail about the inner workings of SSL except to say that it is a critical infrastructure component for any organization that has a desire to protect customer or other confidential information. SSL is widely used by banks, e-commerce companies, and other Web entities that require transmission of sensitive information, such as passwords, social security numbers, etc.
In this gallery, I will show you how to obtain and install a third-party SSL certificate into Microsoft Internet Information Server 7.0 (IIS 7) running on Windows Server 2008. I am running the RC0 version of Windows Server 2008.
In the most simplistic view, there are four kinds of certificates to which you will be exposed during your SSL installation:
- Self-signed SSL certificates: These are certificates that you generate and use to encrypt information passing between a client and your server. These certificates are good insofar as they do allow you to encrypt data, but since they are created on-site, the certificates have not been verified by a third party entity, meaning that the site can't necessarily be trusted.
- Third-party SSL certificate: A third-party SSL certificate provides the same encryption capabilities as a self-signed certificate. However, since the certificate is issued by a third party, it is considered a more trusted type of certificate, especially when the certificate chain extends to a trusted root certificate.
- Intermediate certificate: Not all SSL certificate vendors are created equal. In order to be fully trusted, any certificate you obtain needs to eventually link to a root certificate that is trusted by your Web browser. However, not all vendors' SSL certificates are natively trusted by root certificates. As such, with these vendors, you need to complete the SSL trust chain by (in addition to installing your SSL certificate) installing an intermediate certificate between a root certificate and your new SSL certificate. If you skip this step, users will continue to get certificate errors until this trust chain is established. The use of an intermediate SSL certificate requires a bit of additional network communication at the initial establishment of an SSL-secure session but beyond that, there is no performance penalty.
- Trusted root certificate (or Trusted root certification authorities): A root certificate is the Grand PooBah of the certificate world. In order to complete the trust chain, your individual certificate must, in some way, link to a root certificate.
Note: I am assuming that you will be installing a brand new certificate that you do not yet own and not importing some kind of existing certificate. Further, I assume that you do not have a complex public key infrastructure in-house and that you need to get your certificate from a third party. Finally, I'm making the assumption that you have already installed IIS 7 on your Windows Server 2008 system.
Step 1: Prepare a Certificate Signing Request (CSR)
Regardless of the SSL vendor you use, you first step in the process is to create a Certificate Signing Request (CSR) that will be sent to the SSL vendor of your choice. The CSR is a Base-64 encoded PKCS