Tag Archives: encryption

Setting Up SecuritySpy Over SSL

UPDATE 4 JUNE 2014: SecuritySpy now has built-in support for HTTPS, so the setup described below is no longer needed for setting up SecuritySpy over SSL (although it may still be useful for generating SSL keys, certificates and certificate signing requests for other purposes). See the Web Server Settings section in the SecuritySpy user manual for information about the built-in HTTPS feature.

Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) is a cryptographic protocol that provides secure communications on the internet. It uses two keys to encrypt data: a public key and a private key. URLs that require an SSL connection start with https:// insead of http:// and operate on port 443 instead of 80 by default. SSL increases security as it makes it impossible for someone intercepting the stream of data to decode any information from it.

SecuritySpy does not have built-in support for SSL, however Mac OS X comes with Apache, a fully-featured and powerful web server, that can be used to set up the secure communication between the internet and SecuritySpy. In this way, Apache will be acting as a secure “reverse proxy” web server for SecuritySpy. This post describes how to set this up.

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