SSL (Self Signed Certificate) in Business Connector

Question

After going through hundreds of messages, I am still not clear  about the steps involved in including SSL certificate with HTTP protocol.
1. Instead of subscribing to Trusted Certificate Authority, can we ceate a Self Signed Certificate? If yes, how?
2. Can anyone please explain the steps involved in including SSL certificate (configuring/importing the certificate)? We are successfully calling HTTP and sending the XML document to a HTTPS URL with authorized user name and password. I need to include SSL certificate to complete the requirement. I have looked at all the PDF documents that are available with BC installation and looked at many forums and still haven't found the answers.
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Hi Ramesh.
When untrusted root certificates may be acceptable
Some CAs may be trusted, but in only a very limited way. For example, a company with employees in diverse
locations can make internal documents available to all its employees by setting up a Web site on an intranet that
is only accessible from inside the corporate LAN (i.e. people on the Internet cannot see it). If there are
documents on this site that should have limited access within the company (such as strategic plans or personnel
documents), then these can be protected with SSL.
Since both the servers as well as the browsers are on corporate-controlled equipment, it is well within the
companyu2019s interests to act as its own CA. This means that the company can generate its own root certificate
with which it can sign as many SSL certificates as required for the servers deployed in its intranet. Once this is
done, this certificate should be installed into the certificate stores of all the browsers used in the company. Since
the computers these browsers run on are controlled by the company, this is easy to do: the corporate IT
department can have a policy that the companyu2019s root certificate is installed in the browseru2019s certificate store
whenever a new computer is set up. This prevents security warnings from being displayed whenever an
employee accesses an SSL-secured site on the company intranet.
The advantage to the company is that it can deploy secured sites anywhere on its intranet without purchasing
certificates from an external CA. Note that if the company also runs an e-commerce site, then it should purchase
its SSL certificate from a trusted CA and not use an internal one for sites accessible to the public, who will not
have the certificate installed by the corporate IT department, and thus would receive a security warning.
In such an environment, an unscrupulous employee (most likely a member of the IT team) who has access to
the private key could launch very successful MITM attacks against employees who visit SSL-protected ecommerce
and e-banking sites at work. This will be discussed later in this document. However, the company
can easily protect itself by warning employees not to visit such sites on company time or equipment, since they
are not u201Cbusiness related activities.u201D
Please see this doc related to trusted and untrusted certificate.
http://www.sericontech.com/Downloads/Untrusted_Root_Certificates_Considered_Harmful.pdf