Talk:Certificate signing request

The article currently doesn't answer why a CSR is necessary - why don't you just send the information in plain text? Something similar to the following text really needs to be included in the article itself and not just the talk page. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Martinording (talk • contribs) 16:19, 15 February 2017 (UTC)

A CSR or Certificate Signing request is a block of encrypted text that is generated on the server that the certificate will be used on. It contains information that will be included in your certificate such as your organization name, common name (domain name), locality, and country. It also contains the public key that will be included in your certificate. A private key is usually created at the same time that you create the CSR.

A certificate authority will use a CSR to create your SSL certificate, but it does not need your private key. You need to keep your private key secret. What is a CSR and private key good for if someone else can potentially read your communications? The certificate created with a particular CSR will only work with the private key that was generated with it. So if you lose the private key, the certificate will no longer work.


 * I'm not sure what you mean by this. CSRs are "plain text"; their integrity is protected by a signature. They're normally transferred in some encoded form only because they need to be machine readable anyway, since they contain a digital signature. I've tried to update the introduction to clarify. Namnatulco (talk) 08:42, 16 February 2017 (UTC)
 * There is no SSL certificate. SSL is an old and insecure protocol for transport layer security. The most famous format is the unsigned comment added by 91.221.59.205 (talk) 12:03, 9 October 2020 (UTC)