Thought I´d write a short blog post about public certificates for test environments. By public certificates I mean certificates issued by an external CA and trusted by most platforms.
If you got a test or lab environment and want to publish an external service with SSL, for example ADFS, you need a certificate. This certificate must be trusted by all devices used by consumers of the service. OK, it´s a test environment so you can use you own CA to issue the certificates and import the RootCA certificate on all devices you are testing with. But I guess a lot of you out there isn´t that into certificate that you find that especially interesting. 🙂
So what are your options? You can of course buy a SSL cert from Digicert, Verisign or any other public CA. But I guess you don´t want to spend too much money on your testing. And there is another alternative.
Try StartSSL.com (no, I´m not getting paid for this!). They are using the StarCom Class 1 CA and issues free SSL certificates. And the best part is that the CA is trusted by almost every platform no the market.
All you need to do is to create an account and you´re on! There are of course some restrictions. For example you can´t issue SAN (Subject Alt Name) certs for free, the validity period is only 1 year, no EV certs for free for example. But If you just are using it for test/lab your fine! (And I rebuild my test environment a couple of times a years so I don´t see any real drawbacks!
A comparison chart of their certificates can be found here: http://www.startssl.com/?app=40
Well, that´s all for now folks! 🙂
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