Creating Your Own Certificate Authority

Sites with many Webspace hosts can create their own certificate authority, then sign each server’s certificate from this authority and install the certificate authority certificates onto each client. This will prevent any warnings about untrusted authorities, without requiring the site to obtain a third-party certificate for each server.

There are many third-party applications and systems to assist in the creation and maintenance of a certificate authority that interoperate with the OpenSSL toolkit. These tools should be able to generate signed server certificates for use with Webspace without modification.

A certificate authority is a virtual organization that will sign each of your server keys, allowing the client to assert that the server keys are authentic and have not been tampered with.

To establish the certificate authority, a CA key and self-signed certificate must be created. After the CA certificate and key are created, import the CA certificate on the client device via the Internet Options dialog. Finally, the server keys are signed using the CA certificate, which will allow the client machines to recognize the authenticity of the signatures and allow connections to the server without warning the user about the trustworthiness of the CA.