In a recent project using Azure, SSL worked perfectly on all devices – but those running Android 2.X. It turned out that legacy Android has limited support for modern SSL/TLS features such as SNI and subject alternative name.
Getting TLS configuration right nowadays can be quite tricky. Google Chrome is aggressively pushing for deprecation of old insecure standards by showing warnings or even errors on sites using deprecated https settings. Using a certificate issued merely two years ago, with the standards where common then now shows an error because the SHA-1 algorithm is not considered to be safe for the two remaining years of the lifetime of the certificate. The Google Chrome team is definitely pushing hard for moving web cryptography to safer grounds.
On the other end of the scale (no, I won’t be complaining about Windows XP, it’s not that much of a problem any more) is another Google product: Android. Even with the blazingly fast technology development, people are (IMHO rightfully) expecting a multi €100-device to last for more than a few years. That means that a lot of devices out there are still running Android 2.X. In this particular project, the target audience are not that tech-savvy. A lot of the users even have had to invest in their first smart phone, making their call-and-sms-only phones to history. With that audience, we had to support those old devices. On the other hand SSL warnings or errors in Chrome was unacceptable, so we had to find something that worked for all those platforms – and we did. Oh and by the way, the budget was really, really tight, so we had to find something that wasn’t too expensive.
This is a short guide on how to create a self signed certificate in Windows and store it in files. There are many similar guides available out there, but most of them also imports the freshly created certificate into the certificate store. Sometimes I prefer to be able to create a certificate without polluting my certificate store.
In a developer command prompt (or a normal prompt where you have makecert and pvk2pfx in the path) run these commands:
Getting TLS configuration right nowadays can be quite tricky. Google Chrome is aggressively pushing for deprecation of old insecure standards by showing warnings or even errors on sites using deprecated https settings. Using a certificate issued merely two years ago, with the standards where common then now shows an error because the SHA-1 algorithm is not considered to be safe for the two remaining years of the lifetime of the certificate. The Google Chrome team is definitely pushing hard for moving web cryptography to safer grounds.
