Originally published at https://fek.io.
In my current role, one of the issues I have come across in developing web services and web front-ends is the need to run the server locally under HTTPS or TLS. This is commonly referred to as SSL, but that is not the current term, it is actually TLS.
When the first web browsers were released there was a concern about a secure trust between the browser and the web server. Netscape Navigator introduced the first secure way of transmitting information between the browser and the server using SSL, or Secure Socket Layer in 1995. This created a way of encrypting the communication between the browser and the web server so users would not have to worry about a computer in the middle consuming their private data. Since the Internet is a multilevel network with many network nodes between the user and the server, it is important to encrypt the communication going over those public nodes.
SSL is actually old now and has been replaced with TLS, or Transport Layer Security. TLS like SSL before it requires a x509 certificate to be created for the…
