Overview

Introduction

The purpose of this triage is to show how to set up and enable Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) communications.

SSL is a Public Key/Private Key technology, and setting up SSL is essentially obtaining a Public Key from a trusted organization. While not necessary, installing certificate services on your computer is helpful when troubleshooting SSL issues.

In a nutshell, the process is reduced to the following actions:

1. Creating a Certificate Request
2. Obtaining a Certificate from a Certificate Authority
3. Installing the Certificate

Creating a Certificate Request

This is a series of steps that need to be performed on the web server, and they differ widely depending on the server and version. A web administrator is required to enter information about their organization, their locality, etc. This information will be used to validate the requester.

Obtaining a Certificate from a Certificate Authority

This is when a web administrator submits their request for a certificate to a Certificate Authority (CA), which is a trusted organization like VeriSign or Thawte. For a list of trusted organizations, see the following section in Internet Explorer.

You can choose to trust a new CA by obtaining the Root Certificate from the CA. (See the Obtaining a Root Certificate page for more information.)

Installing the Certificate

After a request has been processed by a CA, the web administrator needs to install the certificate on the web server. Once again, this series of steps needs to be performed on the web server, and the steps differ depending on the web server and version.