Implementing Secure Sockets Layer on Your Site

Abstract

In this chapter, you’ll move from using the HTTP protocol to using HTTPS, and you’ll apply the SSL/TLS protocols to implement cryptography for a secure communication between the clients and the web server of your site. The messages exchanged after this between the client and the web server will be encrypted, and it will be extremely difficult for “any man in the middle” to decrypt them. The HTTPS protocol implementation will be indicated in the protocol part of the URLs as https:// instead of http://, which was used in the previous chapters for simple HTTP connections. For this to work, the public key infrastructure (PKI) of the web server (Apache or Lighttpd) has to be configured correctly.