Archive for 'Security'

How to create a free SSL certificate from CAcert.org

Posted on June 3, 2005, under Security, Technology.

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Having an SSL certificate on your domain for encrypted traffic may be very attractive, but like me, you may get turned off at spending around $400 for personal use. CAcert.org to the rescue! They are making SSL certificates available for free. Awesome! Now I can use a valid SSL certificate for traffic on this domain. Read on for tips on how to do this yourself..
One caveat to this process, is that CAcert is currently not ‘known’ to browsers. This means you will get a warning from the browser stating it doesn’t know the signer of the SSL certificate. You can either always accept this warning, or you can tell your browser who CAcert is by installing their own certificate. To do this, go to CAcert’s Root Certificate page, and click the appropriate link for your browser. The link for IE is obvious, but for Firefox I chose the PEM format. Firefox then presented me with a helpful prompt that completed the install. After that, no more warnings! (Note: for this exact reason alone, I currently would not recommend using CAcert for commercial business, as you could make your potential customers nervous with the warning.) With that taken care of, let’s move on..

While not a complete step-by-step walkthrough, this is essentially how I created a signed SSL certificate for collicott.net from CAcert.org.

Requirements

  • A host with openssl installed.
  • A registered account with CAcert.org
  • Access to your web server’s config to reference/install the SSL certificate

Creating an SSL certificate

  1. First, I logged into my host, and created a key for the hostname I wanted to use SSL on. This key will subsequently be used to create a certificate request we will send to CAcert. Obviously, in these examples, replace out collicott.net with your hostname.
    $ openssl genrsa -out www.collicott.net.key 1024

    Important: Ideally, you should keep this file in a location where others cannot access it.

  2. After the key is created, we want to use it to create a certificate request file to submit to CAcert. Perform this action on the *.key file (on a single line):
    $ openssl req -new -key www.collicott.net.key -out www.collicott.net.csr

    When you create this certificate request file, you will be asked for information for your domain. Some of this information is optional, but make sure you enter the hostname you want in the “Common Name” field (for example, www.collicott.net).

  3. Now that we have the *.csr file, we need to submit it to CAcert. Log in to your CAcert account, then go to “Server Certificates”, then click “New”. At the bottom of the page, paste in the contents of the *.csr file. CAcert will then sign and create an SSL certificate for you.

Once the certificate has been sent from CAcert, we need to install it on our web server. Since there are many types of servers, and your hosting company may provide its own interface on installing an SSL certificate, I won’t go into how to do that. Our host is currently running Apache 1.3, and it was pretty easy to modify the config in about 2 places, and then restart the server. You can find information on a couple servers here:

The information in this post is essentially a hybrid of my experience, and the following two support pages. If you want further information, you might start with them:

How to reset the master password in Firefox

Posted on March 26, 2005, under Security.

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I’ve noticed a couple people coming to this site searching for help on resetting their master password in Mozilla Firefox, so I found help on this and am posting it here in case you happen to be one of those people. :)

Master password – MozillaZine Knowledge Base

If you have lost or forgotten your Master Password or you want to disable the feature, reset your master password. Note that, upon resetting, you will lose all the stored information in the Passwords Manager as this is a built-in security feature to prevent people otherwise resetting your master password and gaining access to your passwords.
  • For Firefox: go to “chrome://pippki/content/resetpassword.xul” (see Chrome URLs) and click on “Reset Password”.
  • For Thunderbird: “Tools -> Options (Edit -> Preferences on Linux) -> Advanced -> Saved Passwords -> Master Password -> Reset Password”.
  • For Mozilla Suite: “Edit -> Preferences -> Privacy & Security -> Master Passwords -> Reset Password”.

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