E-LEARNING PLATFORMS IDENTITY USING DIGITAL CERTIFICATES
E-LEARNING PLATFORMS IDENTITY USING DIGITAL CERTIFICATES

Summary/Abstract: To ensure the identity of a website, SSL digital certificates are used together with HTTPS secured protocol; these two items provide both the server authentication to the user and an encrypted communication channel intended to prevent interception of information exchanged between the user and that website through the Web browser. The current tendency, supported by the major competitors in the market, The Chromium Projects (since December 2014) and Mozilla Foundation (since April 2015), is to impose HTTPS protocol as the default, worldwide used protocol by the Web servers. The paper analyzes the steps followed for creating / obtaining different types of digital certificates and how to configure the Web server to use the secure protocols HTTPS and SSL/TLS so the access to a website will be done in a secure way. As a case study, a Moodle platform was installed on a XAMPP open-source package (locally hosted) and respectively on a Web domain hosted at a specialized provider of Internet services. The identity of this e-learning platform is approached from the perspective of three types of digital certificates. The first type of tested digital certificate is the self-signed one (it doesn't provide a real level of trust and is designed for personal use or in a company intranet). Next, a digital certificate issued by a Certificate Authority will be installed, ensuring the identity and validation of the Web domain. Finally, will be presented the digital certificate issued by Let's Encrypt, a Certificate Authority providing free, trusted digital certificates (in compliance with X.509 standard), automatically obtained by a process that uses the protocol ACME (Automated Certificate Management Environment).The authors present for each type of installed digital certificate, but also for the default case (the Web server is not configured to use a digital certificate), how the Web browsers display the identity of the e-learning platform and what information are available to describe its identity.

• Details
• Contents