---
title: "Introduction"
canonical: "https://docs.cuesystem.com/space/HTBCA/465534996/Introduction"
format: markdown
---
# Description

Today, the Web Admin interface is part of almost all Cue and touchONE products. For security reasons today, the secure HTTPS protocol is becoming the standard for accessing Web sites instead of the older unsecured HTTP.

Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) is an extension of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). It is used for secure communication over a computer network, and is widely used on the Internet. In HTTPS, the communication protocol is encrypted using Transport Layer Security (TLS) or, formerly, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). The protocol is therefore also referred to as HTTP over TLS, or HTTP over SSL.

**The principal motivations for HTTPS are authentication of the accessed website, and protection of the privacy and integrity of the exchanged data while in transit. **It protects against man-in-the-middle attacks, and the bidirectional encryption of communications between a client and server protects the communications against eavesdropping and tampering. In practice, this provides a reasonable assurance that one is communicating with the intended website without interference from attackers.

**The authentication aspect of HTTPS requires a trusted Certification Authority (CA) to sign server-side digital certificates. **This was historically an expensive operation, which meant fully authenticated HTTPS connections were usually found only on secured payment transaction services and other secured corporate information systems on the World Wide Web. In 2016, a campaign by the Electronic Frontier Foundation with the support of web browser developers led to the protocol becoming more prevalent. HTTPS is now used more often by web users than the original non-secure HTTP, primarily to protect page authenticity on all types of websites; secure accounts; and to keep user communications, identity, and web browsing private.

If you run web servers for public use, it is a good idea to use one of the trusted public certification authorities to issue and verify the server certificate. However, if you run Web sites only on the internal network, those authorities cannot be used because internal servers cannot be authenticated by public CAs.

Although it is also possible to use self-signed certificates, many browsers today do not consider them trustworthy and it is therefore better to avoid their use.

Therefore, the best solution is to create your own certification authority, which will be limited to your local network. We will show you how to easily create a local certification authority and how to use it to create and sign server certificates in this guide. To do this, we will use the free tool OpenSSL.

# Requirements

OpenSSL is a program primarily intended for Linux-based operating systems. Although it also exists for Windows, it is not easy to find the right installer on the web. However, because there is WSL 2 (Windows Subsystem for Linux version 2) support in Windows 10 and 11, there is no need to wait for the correct installation program for Windows, and the Linux version can also be used on Windows machine.

You need one of the following computer:

- PC with Linux OS. Ubuntu 20.04 is recommended and examples of commands will be given for this OS.
- Virtual machine running Linux OS. It doesn’t matter what will be used for virtualization, it can be e.g. Virtual Box, VMware...
- Windows 10/11 (64-bit) with enabled WSL 2 (Windows Subsystem for Linux) and installed Linux distribution. Ubuntu 20.04 is recommended. WSL is not available on 32-bit Windows.

OpenSSL must be installed on the machine. In case of Ubuntu 20.04, OpenSSL is included by default.

In this guide, we assume basic knowledge of working with the command line, Linux terminal and Windows PowerShell.