Internet Security
SSL and Trusted Root Certificates
Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) security is used to protect Internet communications from interception. It uses public key encryption techniques to make decrypting intercepted messages extremely difficult. It is used by commercial sites to protect your credit card information and we use it at the law school to protect sensitive information such as your account name and password. For example, when you log into GroupWise Webaccess the sessions are encrypted with SSL.
SSL protected sites use a certificate issued under a protocol known as X.509. The certificate guarantees the identity of the certificate holder and allows for the encryption. Your Internet browser has a built in list of trusted organizations that issue certificates. The best known such organizations are Verisign and Thawte. When your browser encounters a valid certificate issued by one of these organizations, it automatically opens an encrypted session with the host.
The law school uses Thawte certificates on its SSL enabled web sites that serve external users and on some high traffic sites that serve mostly internal users. However, on some of our sites we use a self-generated certificate. This allows us to save on the expense of purchasing Thawte certificates while still offering the same high level of encryption for such sites. When you visit such a site for the first time, your browser will inform you the certificate is valid but is issued by an organization not in your list of trusted issuers. You will then have the option of refusing to continue, trusting the certificate for one session, or adding the certificate to your listed of trusted issuers. We recommend you select the third choice. In fact, you can add the law school's root certificate to your browser's trusted list of certificates right now by downloading our Organizational Authority's public key. Once you start the download, your browser will prompt you that you are downloading a certificate and it will ask you whether you want to open or save the file. Select open and your browser will ask whether you wish to add it to your list of certificates. Indicate yes and then you will be able to open SSL secured sessions with all law school sites that offer that protection.