SSL is a protocol used for transmitting sensitive information over the Internet. This could include information such as account passwords, credit card details, and so on. SSL is most popularly used in conjunction with web browsing over the HTTP protocol.
OpenSSL
library provides an implementation of Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and TLS Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocols.
To demonstrate the use of OpenSSL
, we need two systems. One will be used as a server on which we will install the OpenSSL
package and also Apache. The second system will be used as the client.
We will now see how to create a self-signed certificate using OpenSSL
, for Apache. This will help encrypt traffic to the server: