A CSR or Certificate Signing request is a block of encoded text usually generated by the server software which the certificate will be used on. The CSR will be send to a Certificate Authority when applying for an SSL Certificate.
The CSR (certificate signing request) will contain informations that will be included in the certificate like the organization name, the domain name(s) to be secured / protected, country, city, email address, etc. It also contains the public key that will be included in the certificate. A private key is usually created at the same time that you create the CSR, making a key pair.
The private key doesn't needs to be send to the certificate authority, in fact it needs to remain private. In case of loosing the private key the SSL certificate will no longer function.
To obtain an SSL certificate you must generate a Certificate Signing Request (CSR) on your server. A CSR contains encrypted information required to issue the certificate.
These information are:
- country - the 2 letter code of the country of which you are resident or the company for which you apply for the certificate
- the state (county) and the locality in which you live or have the company headquarters for which you request the certificate
- the full name of the company you represent
- the department of the company responsible for ordering the certificate
- the domain name for which you are applying for the certificate (Fully Qualified Domain Name - FQDN)
After you generate the CSR, please send it to us through the helpdesk system.
