Self-signed or Certified by the Certification Authority?

To be able to use a certificate for an SSL-based browser application, for example, where many anonymous clients are communicating with a server, the certificate should be authenticated by an official certificate authority (CA). This authentication is a confirmation from an independent, trustworthy instance that the server uses this certificate legitimately.

In business-to-business (B2B) communication, self-signed certificates can be used because a third instance is not necessary between two business partners to certify the authenticity.

Each certificate generated here in the Partner Administration is a self-signed certificate that is not certified by a certification authority. However, it can in principle be authenticated. To do this, you have to create a Certificate Signing Request (CSR) from your local certificate and send this CSR file to a certification authority. To do this, open the certificate with a double click (1).

Then click button Create CSR (2). In a further dialogue, you can then copy the CSR (Certificate Signing Request Response) request and send it to the certification authority.

The Certificate Response of the Certificate Authority must then be imported into the self-signed certificate (3). Such a certification by a public certification authority must usually be paid for and is in most cases not required when using Lobster_data.

The order of the individual components of the CSR is as follows:

• CSR Response

• Issuer

• Root

If you only have those components at hand separately, please merge them in an editor into one file in the above mentioned order.