HTTPS certificates
Certificates are used in information technology to securely prove identities. This allows messages or documents to be encrypted so that only the intended recipient can decrypt the content again. Among other things, this technique is used by every web browser when retrieving a page via the HTTPS protocol.
A network subscriber requests the certificate of another subscriber when establishing a communication connection. The certificate and whether the other party authenticates itself using the associated key are checked. Once the identity has been proven, the subsequent message exchange over the connection can be protected against unauthorized manipulation and, optionally, against unauthorized viewing.
In order to use specially generated HTTPS certificates:
- the automatic generation of a certificate for industrial PCs must be disabled,
- a certificate must be requested from a certificate authority (CA)
- and then the HTTPS certificate must be imported.
The exact procedure and the necessary steps are described in this chapter.