Server certificate

What is Server Certificate? It is a digital certificate that has been issued to a server and contains information about it. It contains information on the server?s public key and also other miscellaneous information. Web servers must always have an associated certificate for each external interface, or IP address, that accepts secure connections

But why is it so? In other words, why is a server certificate needed?

The main reason is that a certificate enables server authentication. It verifies the server's identity to the client. The client would need to have an access to the server certificate. The server sends the server certificate as part of SSL key handshake.

A certificate is used with the HTTPS protocol to authenticate web applications. The certificate can be self signed or approved by a certificate authority, which is also referred to as CA. The HTTPS service of the Sun Java System Application Server Platform Edition 8 will not run unless a server certificate has been installed.

Wildcard Server Certificate

Of all the server certificates that are issued and used in the United States, the Wildcard Server Certificate is extremely popular. It works with many SSL sites, because a wildcard (*) is used to stand for the host header name for each of the sites. All SSL enabled web sites that use the same IP/port binding and are distinguished only by their host header names must use the same wildcard server certificate. But not all Certification Authorities issue wildcard certificates.

To become eligible to issue server certificate, one has to be a member of the Administrators group on the local computer to perform the following procedure or procedures. To maintain security, you need to log on by using an account that is not in the Administrators group, and then use the runas command to run IIS Manager as an administrator.