SSL Questions

[kidder]

1) Now, I'm only a student, meaning that I don't have any company and so on. I only wanna play around with SSL on my system. My question is, can I request for a certificate for testing purposes only?

2) Where can I request for a certificate?

3) Certificates uses public key encryption. This means that the original data can be obtained by performing the inverse function of the algorithm. Since it's reversible, what's the use?

4) All a hacker need to do is to try and intercept the transmission, and get hold of the encrypted values. If he wanna login to my account, he can just send the encryted values directly to the server. So what's the use of SSL?

5) When I create the text file for the cert request (of course I didn't send it, since I don't know where to ), I can see that the encryption strength can be set to 512, 1024, 2048, 4096, 16384. But I thought that usually certs can only support 40 or 128 bit encryption?

6) Also, what's the meaning of bit? For example, what's the meaning of 128 bit?

OK, basically I know nothing about encryption or SSL. If you think that my questions don't seem to make any sense pls correct me, but PLEASE don't flame me or laugh at me.....

[HowardTheDuck]

Hi

1. You can create a certificate on your own. The only thing is that registering it online costs a lot. These online certs are more trusted (cause they are related to existing companies...) than self made ones, that's it.

2. No request, just create one. quite easy on unix like systems, never done on windows...

3. Hm... i give you my key and you reverse it - ok? I'll ask you in a few years what my private key was, cause until then it very likely changed

4. if it where that easy no server would have remote access (i think you talk about SSH here)

5. 128 bits is the strongest allowed for browsers to use.

6. 128 bit is like a word with 16 characters (8bits = 1 byte = 1 ASCII character)

for more information read and follow links from
http://www.openssl.org/

hth
Yours
HTD