Using a Certificate Signing Request to acquire your SSL certificate

When publishing a website to the Internet, it is generally a best practice to use an SSL certificate on the website that you acquired from a public Certification Authority (CA). These are the big certificate issuing entities such as Entrust, Verisign, GoDaddy, and so on. It is possible to use your own internal PKI infrastructure to issue SSL certificates that can be exposed to the outside world, but it can be difficult to set up the certificate infrastructure appropriately and securely. As cheap as SSL certificates are, it is worth the investment to have the security of knowing that the certificate you are running on your website is the one and only certificate of its kind, and that nobody else has a chance to get their hands on a copy of your certificate and spoof your website. Modern browsers also have a pre-built list of the public CAs that they trust; this makes using a certificate from one of those public entities even...