SSL Certificates
This InCommon SSL certification program began in Spring, 2011. Using this program, any University of Florida domain may obtain SSL certificates at no cost to the host department. A license agreement funded by the University of Florida Information Technology provides an unlimited number of certificates for the University of Florida through a contract with the InCommon Federation. The SSL certificates are issued from Sectigo, via the InCommon agreement.
Each college and major unit director may assign two or three individuals within their area to administer the SSL certificates.
Assistance
For assistance, please contact the UFIT Identity & Access Management team.
To obtain SSL certificates, staff should contact the IT office for their respective college or unit. Each college and unit should have established localized procedures. If there are issues finding a contact, the UFIT Identity & Access Management team can assist you in locating the appropriate staff member for your college or unit. In most cases, certificates may be obtained within a few hours.
The process for a unit to become enabled to issue InCommon SSL certificates is easy. The college or unit director provides:
- information regarding the college
- the domains within that unit, and
- the names of two or three individuals who should be given access to the Certificate Manager software tools. These individuals are known as Department Registration Authority Officers (DRAO) to the Certificate Manager software application
Request a Certificate
UFIT IAM doesn't directly provide SSL Certificates. Instead, we delegate that ability to College and Departmental IT groups around the University. So you will work with your local IT to acquire a certification. The following 3 steps outline how to go about acquiring a certification. Please contact the Certificate Administrators if you have any questions.
The first step for a unit to become enabled to manage and request certificates is to create a group name. This will create a college group per Campus IT director. An example of the data required includes:
- College Name: Engineering, College of
- Address: 220 Weil Hall, PO BOX 112345
- City: Gainesville
- State: Florida
- Postal Code: 32611
The Certificate Adminstrator reserves the right to alter the submitted college descriptive name. Name that are easily found in an alphabetic list are preferred. For example, College of Engineering may be entered as Engineering, College of.
Provide a list of domains you want to activate SSL certificates for in your unit. You can send as many as you like. At least one domain is required for initial setup. You may add others as you need to by submitting them to the Certificate Administrators. The preferred style of your submitted list of domains is like this: Domain: *.eng.ufl.edu, Description: College of Engineering website Domain: *.ise.ufl.edu, Description: Industrial Engineering website
The IT director should submit information for two or three individuals to be setup for their area. As a reminder, these individuals will be known as a Department Registration Authority Officers (DRAO) to the certificate management software. The information required for each individual should be submitted like this:
- UFID: 00000099
- GatorLink ID: algator
- Business Email Address*: algator@ufl.edu
- Full Name of the proposed DRAO: Alligator, Albert T.
- Phone number: 555-1383
Your area may consider using a mail alias or mail list for the emails (example: ENG-certs@list.ufl.edu) of your DRAOs. This will make changes to DRAO for your unit staff easier to transition. Emails would be sent to the list.
After an individual is added for the unit, the Certificate Administrators will contact the DRAO with an initial password and logon information.
Certificate Discovery Tools are available for the unit DRAO to locate and manage certificate issued with InCommon and outside of InCommon. Please visit the InCommon Web site for the user guide.
Reports and Notifications are available from the certificate administration software application. Visit the InCommon Web site for more info on reports.
Creating and Managing Certificates as a DRAO is defined section 2 of in the user guide found at the InCommon site. University of Florida standards and policies should be observed when creating all certificates.
Support
Support for the InCommon Certificate service can be acquired via a few channels, depending on what assistance you need.
If you need assistance with any of the following, please contact UFIT IAM Cert Admins at: IT-IAMSSLCertAdmin@ufl.edu
- Add a new domain
- Add a department
- Add/Remove Departmental administrators (DRAOs)
- Change permissions for a department or DRAO
- Change/reset password for a DRAO
Additional information such as user guides and technical support can be found at InCommon's certificate support website.
If you encounter a technical problem with the Sectigo Cert Manager system, please contact Sectigo directly. Information on how to do this can be found at the InCommon support link above.