A friend asked me today where he can get free SSL certs, as he’d heard me mention this before. CAcert offer this service, but before you get all security conscious:
- The use a web-of-trust system of assurance to make sure people are who they say they are
- You need to be assured by at least 2 highly trusted assureres to create a server certificate
- They protect their root certificate (in my opinion) very well
That’s just a short list of why they are trust-worthy. Check out their site, help page and wiki for more info.
And don’t forget to install their root certificate in your browsers and mail clients. And when I say browsers and mail clients, read also: instant messaging applications, operating systems, in fact anything that might use SSL.
Finally, why not support the inclusion of their root certificate by default?
These do:
- FreeBSD
- Nokia 770
- Knoppix
- Debian
- Gentoo
- MirBSD
- CentOS
- Wildfire
These will soon:
- Grml 0.5
- Mozilla
- Fedora
Your app not listed? Ask the developers to include it!