On Wed, 15 May 2002, John Jones wrote: > Please help me get my facts straight on what this is all about. > > What I want to do: > Send an XML string from a non-browser client to a server, but securely, because it >will contain credit card information and other personal junk. > It has to be on the Mac and Windows platforms at least. > > Steps I see: > Use OpenSSL because I can get that for OS X and also for Windows. > OK, after that, I'm fuzzy.
Step 2: purchase Eric Rescorla's excellent book. AFAIK, it's the only one he's written, so if you do an author search on Amazon you can't go wrong. It should help you with the tedium of programming using OpenSSL. > Steps I vaguely see, please help me if you can: > > 2) I need to use the command line utility that comes with OSSL to make > uh..what? A private key? A certificate? The user will never see > this stuff, hopefully. Yes, and Eric's book doesn't really address these issues much. I haven't really found any book that does in a clear and concise way. > 3) I need to put a copy of the private key on the server and the client, > and somehow that gets used to to encrypt the private information > the client sends. If memory serves well, I believe that Eric's book does address these sorts of issues. > I'm sorry to be so confused and thick headed. I didn't think about SSL at > all before about a couple of weeks ago, and I'm trying to understand the > big picture. It's a pretty intimidating subject for newbies and there's not much comprehensive documentation out there. Feel free to hit me with more questions if you want. -cj -- Chris Cleeland, cleeland_c @ ociweb.com, http://www.milodesigns.com/~chris Principal Software Engineer, Object Computing, Inc., +1 314 579 0066 Support Me Supporting Cancer Survivors in Ride for the Roses 2002 >>>>>>>>> Donate at http://www.milodesigns.com/donate <<<<<<<<< ______________________________________________________________________ OpenSSL Project http://www.openssl.org User Support Mailing List [EMAIL PROTECTED] Automated List Manager [EMAIL PROTECTED]
