FP98: How to Use Secure Sockets Layer to Help Protect Pages in Your Web

When you create a new FrontPage Web, you can select the Secure Connection Required option. When you select this option, the entire Web will use the Secure Socket Layer (SSL) port to encrypt all data sent to or from FrontPage. This is called secured authoring. You can also specify if you want to use the SSL port for links to specific pages in a normal, unsecured Web. This is called secured browsing. This article describes how to accomplish both secure authoring and secure browsing.

Secure Authoring

To use SSL for secure authoring, follow these steps:

1. On the File menu, point to New, and then click FrontPage Web.
2. In the New FrontPage Web dialog, click Change.
3. In the Change Location dialog box, type the name of the new FrontPage Web, and then click to select the Secure connection required (SSL) check box.
4. Click OK.
5. Click OK again.

SSL provides a highly secure (encrypted and authenticated) communication between the client and the server, based on public-key cryptography. To send a secure message, the sender encrypts the message with the recipient's public key, and the recipient decrypts the message with the recipient's private key. Because only the recipient has the private key that can decrypt the message, the message is secure.

To guarantee authenticity, a certificate accompanies the public key. A certificate is a digital signature on a digest of the friendly (human readable) name of the participant, together with the participant's public key. The certificate is encrypted with the private key of the certifying authority. To check the authenticity of the public key of the participant, anyone can compute the digest of the friendly name and public key for that participant and can decrypt the certificate for that public key using the public key of the certifying authority, and check that the same digest results.

Note FrontPage 98 does not support 128-bit encryption; it only supports 40 bit encryption.

For additional information about the use of security certificates with FrontPage, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

Secure Browsing

If you want to require that SSL be used to browse some of your pages, you can mix ports on a single Web by using a fully qualified Uniform Resource Locator (URL)(for example, http://example.microsoft.com/default.htm).

Web servers use a separate port for SSL connections. Instead of linking to default.htm link to: Go from the default port (usually 80) to the SSL port (usually 443). To go from the SSL port to port 80, link to http://example.microsoft.com/default.htm. To create a SSL link from a page in your Web for secure browsing, follow these steps:

1. In FrontPage Editor, select the text that you want to use for your hyperlink.
2. On the Edit menu, click Hyperlink.
3. In the URL box change http:// to https:// and type the complete URL of your page.
   
   For example, type the following:
   https://example.microsoft.com/default.htm
4. Click OK.