: Amazon EC2 and CA-signed certificate with LAMP stack I have an EC2 server set up, using the free trial. I have installed my LAMP stack and the docs urge me to get SSL going. Using yum, I

Posted in: #Apache #Security #WebDevelopment

I have an EC2 server set up, using the free trial. I have installed my LAMP stack and the docs urge me to get SSL going. Using yum, I installed ssl with the mod24_ssl package. Currently I can put the ec2 public DNS name into my web browser with the prefix and I can add a security exception but the docs further indicate that I need to obtain a CA-signed certificate (which costs money).

per AWS documentation

This section describes the process of generating a certificate signing request (CSR) from a private key, submitting the CSR to a certificate authority (CA), obtaining a signed certificate, and configuring Apache to use it.

A self-signed SSL/TLS X.509 certificate is cryptologically identical to a CA-signed certificate. The difference is social, not mathematical; a CA promises to validate, at a minimum, a domain's ownership before issuing a certificate to an applicant. Each web browser contains a list of CAs trusted by the browser vendor to do this.

Currently I have set up security groups to maintain control over which IPs can use which ports, but this is my own project for migrating a website I made at school and I'd like to simply buy a domain name, park it on my AWS server, and allow people to explore my website. The website will not be using HTTPS.

Can anyone help me out with whether or not I need CA-signed certificate, given that I am only looking to host a 5 page website for my friends (and my resume)? This was not covered in my class and I believe it's because our class server was set up prior to us hopping on it and building our webpages.

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