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• 11-22-2005, 10:36 AM

  Cclover Joined on 05-18-2005, 9:40 PM Denver Posts 0

  SelfSSL Questions Reply Contact I want to set up two-way authentication with encryption between a desktop .net windows app and several web services we built to service the app.  I'm thinking that this needs to be done with ssl certs.  This is a bit outside our comfort zone. I want to maintain a commercial wild card cert on the server that hosts the web services and install a cert on the client's side in order to facilitate client-to-server athentication and encrypted messaging. Using certs from authorities such as Versign, for cost-to-client reasons, is something we want to avoid.  That leaves us with  self-signed certs for the client.  I know I can use SelfSSl to create the client cert, but I'm uncertain about whether or not a cert generated with SelfSSL will be able to satisfy our needs, specifically in dealing with a desktop client communicating with web services. Specific questions:  Are certs generated using SelfSSL of the x509 type? Are SelfSSL certs open-ended date-wise?  IOW, can I make a cert that will last forever(or at least a very long time)? If anyone has some experience/advice/answers for dealing with this issue, I could really use some help. thanx </chaz>

• 11-29-2005, 3:58 AM

  In reply to

  qbernard Joined on 03-26-2003, 2:12 AM Malaysia Posts 3,195

  Re: SelfSSL Questions Reply Contact In this case, I would still recommend you to install Microsoft CA instead of seflssl which design for only local machine SSL usage. You can't trust it't CA root as there's none, and the cert is generated and inserted directly to website rather than a file. What you can do of couse is to use cert mmc then export out the cert, which is in pfx format. Not x509. You can specify the expiry date to a long time using /V switch. Again that's not the point, you would be better off with Microsoft CA, which allow you to issue cert, download CA root cert in x.509 format, as well as the cert expiry date. Cheers, Bernard Cheah