What is SSL?

Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) is an encryption technology used to secure the data exchange between a website and a visitor's web browser. When a user communicates with a website, the data can travel to the server as plain text, which is susceptible to data theft.

On the other hand, if this data is encrypted, it cannot be read even when intercepted. That's why it's critical to secure a website with SSL.

Certificates and certificate authority (CA)

Certificate authority

Regulatory organizations, with the help of standard policies, issue certificates to a domain to declare it trustworthy. Every generated certificate is unique to the company being certified, which makes identification easy.

CAs verify all the necessary information about a company before issuing it a certificate, and they keep their records updated, which adds to the trustworthiness of the certificates.

Some popular CAs are Verisign, Comodo, and GoDaddy.

SSL certificate

This is a digital identity of a company, which ensures that a visitor is talking only to its intended website and whatever data he submitted to the site is encoded and reach only the intended site. This system is analogous to banks recognizing their customers by their signatures. In this case, the browsers (thereby the end-users) are programmed to trust these CA presented certificates.

In order for a CA to generate an SSL certificate for a company, it first collects the information about the company and other identifiers such as its public key (or digital signature), and then binds them all with the certificate, which could be a piece of encrypted token or something similar. This generates a unique identifier for the company.

KeyStore

Keystore is specifically designed to store various kinds of encryption information.

CSR

Every certificate issuance process begins with a certificate request from the company. CAs refer to this process as a certificate signing request (CSR). CAs accept the company information and digital signatures in a special form of file: the CSR file.

The usual SSL issuance process

Being issued an SSL involves three steps:

• Generate a CSR and submit it to a CA.
• CA validates the request and digitally signs and issues an SSL certificate.
• Install the SSL certificate to your website for proper authentication.

Enabling an SSL connection in Exchange Reporter Plus

For detailed instructions on how to enable SSL in Exchange Reporter Plus, click here.