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CAcert event at Drupalcon

Submitted by Kristof Van Tomme on Sun, 08/24/2008 - 21:23.

At Drupalcon we'll have a CAcert event organized by the people from erdfish. If you need some assuring you'll find them every day of the conference from 12:45 to 13:15 on the ground floor in the sitting corner near the registration desk.

The CAcert organization was founded in order to establish the first non profit certificate authority. Until CAcert's foundation, globally verifiable certificates were offered only by commercial certificate authorities. The cost of those commercial certificates are comparably high; thus, the major part of communication within the World Wide Web is still transmitted unencrypted and unverified.

CAcert's goal is to open up IT security issues to Open Source philosophy; a philosophy commonly known especially from Open Source software or Open Source operating systems.

CAcert certificates can be used in various scenarios. It's possible, for instance, to secure a web server with HTTPS using a CAcert certificate. You can also use a certificate for both encryption and adding of digital signatures to your emails using the S/MIME protocol. Thus, it's no longer necessary to use auto signed certificates. For both commercial and private use a CAcert certificate is free of charge.

erdfisch supports CAcert, and during Drupalcon they offer the possibility of assuring visitors of the conference if they like to. 'Assuring' means that they confirm your identity giving you the possibility to get your own free CAcert certificate. This service is offered daily between 12.45am and 1.15pm.

Interested parties have the possibility to pre-register at http://weboftrust.org/ . This will help them to speed up the assurance process. Please check out this web address for further details of the pre-registration process. The actual assurance will take place face to face at Drupalcon in the time frame specified above. Please have at least one photo identification (i.e. passport, driver's license) ready in order to complete the assurance process.

Additional information about CAcert and CAcert certificates can be found at www.cacert.org