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Author Topic: Secured Access to Forum  (Read 3328 times)

housetier

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Secured Access to Forum
« on: January 14, 2008, 07:33 AM »
I just saw it is possible to access dc.com via https. While I think this is absolutely terrific, my favorite webbrowser does not like the fact that some content is not transmitted via https. So far I have added an exception for dc.com so firefox will accept the certificate. Also the certificate does not seem to be signed by a Certificate Authority (CA) such as CAcert.org.

The red font indicates something: red-adddress-bar.pngSecured Access to Forum

Also, the lock symbol is "broken": broken-lock.pngSecured Access to Forum

And when I look at the details, I see why the address is red and the lock is broken: partial-encrpytion.pngSecured Access to Forum

CAcert is a CA whose certificates are free, which is why its competitor fight hard so software vendors won't include their Root Certificates into products...

cacert300x120.png

There are instructions how to get a certificate signed by CAcert. Then users only need to import (and trust) the Root Certificate from CAcert: PEM format seems to be right for most browsers except Internet Explorer.

If dc.com could get a server certificate from, say, verisign, users would not have to do anything; however, these certificates usually cost money. I know all this is a hassle, but in this day and age security, protection, or trust don't come easy...