A False Sense of Security

Creating self signed certs is straight forward:

umask 277

openssl genrsa 1024 > host.key

openssl req -new -x509 -nodes -sha1 -days 365 -key host.key > host.cert

cat host.cert host.key > host.pem


You then import the generated cert in a client; e.g. with php/curl, the incantation is:

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CAINFO, '.../ssl/host.pem');

Et Voilà! we have a 'secure' communication path between client and server...