Generate an X.509 Certificate (with a WebID? watermark) to be managed by the Firefox browser-based keystore

Prerequisites

  1. Set up an X.509 certificate issuer and HTTPS listener.
  2. Set up an X.509 Certificate Service.

Certificate Generation Process

These steps will work against any ODS instance where you have the requisite privileges.

  1. Go to the ODS home page (local or remote) and log in as an ODS user (registering as such first, if necessary).



  2. After log in, you will have an ODS-generated Person Entity Identifier (an HTTP URI that Identifies "You") of the form: http://cname/dataspace/person/user-name#this



  3. Fill out your profile, if still in default state. (Note: If this step is skipped, the resulting X.509 certificate may not have a human-readable name.)



  4. Go to Security:



  5. Go to Certificate Generator:



  6. Fill out the form, for example:
    • Country: UK;
    • Organization: OL;
    • Valid for: 90 hours.



  7. Click Submit certificate request.
  8. Firefox should show that it is generating a private key:



  9. When private key generation is finished, Firefox should report a successful installation of the certificate:



  10. Go to X.509 Certificates.
  11. The new certificate should be shown in the list of certificates available for the ODS user:



  12. Note you have now also the option automatic WebID? Login set to enabled -- a powerful feature benefits of which we will demonstrate next in our example:



  13. Verify the new certificate by performing the following steps:
    1. Log out and access https://id.myopenlink.net/ods/;
    2. When prompted by your browser, select the new certificate generated above:



    3. You should then be presented with the ODS Log-in form. Click WebID? Login:



    4. You should now be successfully logged in:



    5. If you now log in as another user (e.g., demo), you can share a resource to the above user, using a WebID-based ACL, which is itself enabled by the new WebID?-watermarked X.509 Certificate.

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