Security of data in transit over the Internet becomes increasingly necessary because of steadily growing data volume and importance. Nowadays, every user of a public network sends various types of data, from email to credit card details daily, and he would therefore like them to be protected when in transit over a public network. To this end, a practical SSL protocol has been adopted for protection of data in transit that encompasses all network services that use TCP/IP to support typical application tasks of communication between servers and clients.

The SSL protocol was originally developed by Netscape, to ensure security of data transported and routed through HTTP, LDAP or POP3 application layers. SSL is designed to make use of TCP as a communication layer to provide a reliable end-to-end secure and authenticated connection between two points over a network (for example between the service client and the server). Notwithstanding this SSL can be used for protection of data in transit in situations related to any network service, it is used mostly in HTTP server and client applications. Today, almost each available HTTP server can support an SSL session, whilst IE or Netscape Navigator browsers are provided with SSL-enabled client software.
In this tutorial, I am going to explain how to install SSL certificate without using control panel. I have experienced that, You can install the SSL certificate easily for a domain easily, by using control panel, but it’s little bit complex to install the SSL certificate where you don’t have any control panel. I hope this article will help you in this work.
For an SSL encrypted web server you will need to install some module before installing SSL. Depending on your web server you are using you may or may not have “OpenSSL” and “mod_ssl” module installed.
This module “mod_ssl” can be configured to provide several items of SSL information as additional environment variables to the SSI and CGI namespace. This information is not provided by default for performance reasons.
The “openssl” is a certificate management tool and the shared libraries that provide various encryption and description algorithms and protocols, including DES, RC4,RSA & SSL.
However, generally these modules are installed in the server.
Let me give you the steps to check whether these modules installed.
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If you have PHP installed on your server, you can create a php file, let’s called it phpinfo.php and add this , and open the file in your browser, this shows information about your system environment, to quickly find info about your Apache loaded modules, locate ‘Loaded Modules’ on the resulting page.
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You may follow the below given links if these modules are not installed in the server.
1.If you are using Apache web server you can install the module “mod_ssl” using following yum command.
——->In centos operating system run following command.
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yum install mod_ssl openssl
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——>Use following command, if ubuntu
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apt-get install apache2 apache2-common
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——->Now run following command in ubuntu to enable mod_ssl
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a2enmod ssl
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Please note that, while using yum command it will give you message whether the module is installed or not.
2.Now, you need to Generate CSR & purchase SSL. You can purchase SSL from any authorize body (ex:-Godaddy,crucialp,crazydomain etc.)
3.You have to add a virtual-Host entry inside the web server configuration file. You may follow the below given example to add the virtual-Host entry.
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SSLEngine on
SSLCertificateFile /etc/ssl/yourdomain.com.crt
SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/ssl/yourdomain.com.key
SSLCACertificateFile /etc/ssl/yourdomain.com.ca

Allowoverride All

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3.Here you have to create a separate file for SSL, CSR and for private key. You have to put these files inside the folder “/etc/ssl”. You can follow the below given example to add all these file inside the above mentioned directory.
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1.Go to’/etc/ssl’ directory.
2.Create a file like “yourdomain.com.crt” for SSL certificate. You can create similarly files for CSR and key.
3. Paste all the SSL, CSR and private key inside the respective files.
4. Save and quit
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Please make sure that you have changed the IP address taken in the above example with your correct IP address & document root should be also changed with your correct document root. After completion of this step restart your web server.
5.In order to check whether SSL installed, access website using the URL ‘http://192.168.1.56:443’ and ensure that it is working fine.
Final Note:
After having the SSL installation, you can access a site securely by changing the URL from http:// to http:// and using port 443. When an SSL certificate is installed on a website, you can be sure that the information you enter (contact or credit card information), is secured and only seen by the organization that owns the website. Always, there is a never-ending stream of things you can do, but if you take care of the ones described here, you can perform the task in easy and secure way. I am very thankful to you for spending your valuable time on reading this article.
Any questions????
We will be happy to hear from you..

About the Author :

Saurabh Suman works as a Software Engineer in Bobcares. He loves reading books and listening to music in his free time.