Creating a Self Signed Certificate for IIS
Part 3 - Installing Your Signed Certificate

Written by Tony Bhimani
April 19, 2004

Requirements
Microsoft Windows XP
Microsoft IIS 5.1
KeyMan - which is available for download at http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/keyman

We now have our Signed Certificate. Our next steps are to tell IIS to use our certificate. Once this is done then we have a SSL secured site.

Open Control Panel, Administrative Tools, double-click the Internet Information Services icon. Expand the tree and right-click your web site and select properties. Click on the Directory Security tab and click the Server Certificate button. The IIS Certificate Wizard appears, click next.

Select the Process the pending request and install the certificate option, then click next.

Enter the path to your certificate or browse to it using the browse button. Click next.

The IIS Certificate Wizard displays a summary of our certificate. Everything should look good. Click next.

IIS has now installed our certificate. Click finish.

Now it is time to test out our certificate. Open Internet Explorer (or whichever browser you prefer) and go to your web site. Be sure to use https:// to access the secure version of your site. For this example we used localhost as the common name corresponding to the certificate. When going to https://localhost we are greeted with a Security Alert dialog. This dialog informs us that we are accessing a secure site, but the certificate wasn't signed by a true Certificate Authority. If we had our certificate signed by a true authority (such as VeriSign, Thawte, or GeoTrust to name a few), then this dialog box would not show up. Click the yes button to continue.

We are now on our secure web site. Notice the padlock in the status bar. If you double-click it we should get some details about our certificate.

The certificate properties are shown to us. It shows the site it was issued to (localhost), who issued it (Self Certificate Provider - the mock authority we created), and how long it is valid for (one year).

This concludes the Creating a Self Sign Certificate for IIS tutorial. I hope you found it useful.

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