Egressive Root Certificate Authority

You are invited to download a copy of Egressive's Root Certificate Authority.

Egressive provides a number of hosting services, including website and email hosting. Because much of the information we provide is private to our customers and their businesses, we go to some trouble to minimise the possibility that they might inadvertently reveal the means of accessing their content to malicious 3rd parties. For email collection, webmail, and VPNs (in conjunction with our Open Anywhere Office services and customer Open For Business servers) we employ secure transmission of data.

The mechanism for secure - encrypted - data transmission is called "SSL" (Secure Sockets Layer). It involves using a large random number, called a "key", in conjunction with another random number, called a Certificate Authority. In some cases people buy certificates from "trusted" authorities like Verisign and Thawte. They are trusted because their systems and processes for issuing new certificates are deemed suitably rigorous by companies like Microsoft and browser makers like Mozilla to include with their web browsers. When you visit a web page using a certificate issued by one of your browser's trusted certificate authorities, you see the little "lock" icon. You can achieve a similar security with email collection, although there usually isn't any visible indication of this.

Purchasing trusted certificates is quite costly, and they have to be purchased individually for each application, which is a significant procedural overhead. Given that we have the technology to do so, we can short circuit this process by creating our own Certificate Authority, which includes generating our own Root CA. This, in turn, allows us to create sub-certificates for our customers which provide equal security to that offered by commercially purchased certificates, but at a fraction of the price. It also gives us the control required to disable access in the event that any of our customers or their employees/users, should it be necessary to do so.