Re: Free SSL certs for .edu by company included in browser lists

["Br. Kenneth Arnold" <bkarnold () CBU EDU>]

We have three processes using certificates from ipsCA and will be
adding a fourth process soon.  My experience has been:

1.  The price is very reasonable. Free for two years to edu domains
and very inexpensive after that.
2.  All of our certificates are on Oracle Application Server so far.
3.  The root CA certificate of ispCA and an intermediate certificate
needed to be loaded into the Oracle wallet in order to recognize the
user certificate.  Supposedly something similar needs to be done on Apache.
4.  They use the names and email addresses on domain registration to
verify that the request is valid.  If the person requesting the
certificate if one of the names on domain registration, the
certificate is generated without any further verification.  If
someone else requests a certificate, that request must be verified by
one of the names on domain registration.
5.  They have customer service but my one experience using that
service took about 1-2 weeks to get an answer.
6.  Their website is very easy to use.
7.  We have two certificates that we use for UW email from
Thawte.  The only email product that they support seems to be Courier
IMAP so we intend to stay with Thawte on those certificates when they expire.
8.  Their website claims "IpsCA root certificate is present in more
than 98% of today's browsers Internet Explorer,  Mozilla and
Firefox".  We have not had any complaints yet from people who had
browsers that did not recognize their root certificate in their browser.


My recommendation is that if you can use their website to generate a
certificate and if you can use their instructions to get the
certificate working properly, then use their certificate on your
process.  If you have any
problems that would require you to contact customer service, go with
a different certificate authority.

Brother Kenneth Arnold

At 08:51 AM 11/17/2006, you wrote:
> Anyone using these folks or know anything about them:
>
> http://certs.ipsca.com/
>
> They also advertise wild card certs with no limit
> on hosts for $276.00/year.
>
> http://certs.ipsca.com/Products/ipsca_ssl_Wildcard_certificates.ASP
>
>
>
> --
> Gary Flynn
> Security Engineer
> James Madison University
> www.jmu.edu/computing/security

Brother Kenneth Arnold, FSC
Director of Network Systems
Christian Brothers University
Information Technology Services
(901) 321-4333