UW Services
How to install the UW Services CA Root Certificate in your browser
To enable trouble free browsing to https web sites here at the University of Washington (and thus the iSchool), users should install the University of Washington Certificate Authority Root Certificate. This certificate allows your computer to 'trust' these secure sites and functionality will not be inhibited.
We frequently get questions about the security certificate error that people receive when using the iSchool SharePoint portal. This FAQ specifically addresses that issue and will fix others as well.
The UW has its own Certificate Authority, known as the UW Services Certificate Authority ("UW Services CA" for short), which issues digital certificates for UW services.
By installing the UW Services CA Root Certificate in your browser, you will be able to use secure UW Web sites with certificates issued by the UW Services CA without warning messages.
The security certificate for the iSchool SharePoint Portal is valid however we use the UW certificate authority; it isn't signed by one of the major certificate vendors that your browser already knows about. We usually do that for sites that are used "internally" as opposed to those that have a public face to them because security certificates can be fairly expensive when you have lots of different servers.
For example the main iSchool website has a certificate signed by Thawte (a major commercial provider), but the SharePoint Portal site uses a certificate signed by UW itself.
To add the UW Services CA Root Certificate to your web browser so those errors go away, please follow these instructions.
Windows XP (and most other operating systems)
Browse to here:
https://www.washington.edu/computing/ca/index.html
and follow the instructions.
Windows Vista
1) Browse to here:
https://certs.cac.washington.edu/
2) Click on "Get the root certificate".
3) Click the link to "Retrieve this certificate in DER format" and save the file (certs.cac.washington.cer) to your hard drive.
4) Click Start and type "certmgr.msc" in the search field which will open the Certificate Manager.
5) Expand Trusted Root Certificate Authorities
6) Click on Certificates to select it and then click
Action > All Tasks > Import
to launch the Certificate Import Wizard.
7) Click Next.
8) Click Browse and select the file (above) that you just saved to your hard drive.
9) Click Next.
10) Confirm that it will be placed in the Trusted Root Certification Authorities store and click Next.
11) Click Finish and Yes to install the certificate and close the Certificate Manager.
Last update: 2009-10-08 18:52
Author: Martin Criminale
Revision: 1.3
