Establishing Secure Connections with Digital Certificates

You will require a secure connection to access APIs connected to your network. To have a secure connection, digital certificates will be required. A digital certificate is a file or electronic password that proves the authenticity of a device, server, or user. This helps Organisations ensure that only trusted devices and users can connect to their networks.

You must supply a certificate and private key to the API to create a secure connection which is called an SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) connection. An SSL protocol establishes authenticated and encrypted links between networked computers. Once you have an SSL connection, you can connect outside of localhost (the machine the API runs on). Without this certificate, the API will only listen for connections from the local host. External connections will only be allowed if they are secure (HTTPS or Secure WebSockets).

The identity the API is running as will need access to the files to use them, so the certificates must be stored in an accessible folder or library.

It is up to the user to supply a suitable certificate for their usage. Some providers are:

• Comodo
• Digicert
• Identrust
• Globalsign

If a certificate authority used is not recognized by the browser, then this will have to be handled dependant on the browser that is being used. You will need to sign your certificate with your own certificate authority and adding that to your application or browser

With Google Chrome, you can use this guide.
With Firefox, you can use this guide.
With Safari, you can use this guide.

If you wish to use different browsers you will need to find their guides to be able to setup.

Only a single certificate configuration is supported. If a password is supplied, it is obfuscated for security. The API does not make a copy of the certificate or private key as this could violate security if they are in limited access folders.