Security Certificates

• Security Certificates are a method of establishing trust between different entities on a network
  • An entity can be a person or a machine
  • Certificates can, in addition to creating trust relationships, also be used to encrypt communications
    • This is especially important when transmitting a username and password across the internet
• Certificate warnings indicates that your computer does not know the origin of the certificate on the server
  • Since your computer cannot verify the origin of the certificate on the server, it cannot establish a trust relationship with the server
  • By temporarily overriding the warning, you instruct your computer to trust the certificate on the server
  • Once the trust is established, then the certificates can be used to encrypt the communication so your password is not transmitted in clear text
• Certificates can be purchased for the server so the warning doesn't appear in your browser, but they are prohibitively expensive for our hosting environment
  • Certificates in general are very very expensive in proportion to the effort required to make them.
  • Computerisms can make certificates that will encrypt a connection every bit as good as a paid certificate for a small fraction of the cost
    • Certificates generated by Computerisms will not be automatically trusted by your computer, and therefor will always show you the certificate warning
• In the case of Computerisms and its customers, we can manually establish our trust, which in turn allows encryption of our passwords
  • Despite the warning, the encryption is still taking place on our system
    • Said another way: Security certificates are still securing your transmission, even though the warning might make you think otherwise.

Go to https://cal.domain.tld and accept the Security Certificate warning Login with your email address as your User Name and your email password for Password and click Go