Wildcat! supports standard encryption using SSL and TLS to provide encrypted secured internet communications with your end users for the following Wildcat! Internet hosting servers:
SSL (Secured Socket Layer) is the primary security method used in Wildcat! to provide secured encrypted technology to the TCP/IP services. TLS (Transport Layer Security) is an option if the server and the client both supports it.
Click here to read about SSL Installation and Setup
If you are connected to the Internet, you can read the most current SSL Information/Update available at the Santronics Support site by clicking here, http://www.winserver.com/sslinfo.
When an end-user (client) connects to one of the Wildcat! internet hosting servers, there is basically two parts to the communications the client will have with the server; the login phase with the client provides the user id and password and the data exchange phase where a particular operation is performed such as reading mail, transferring a file, ordering a product, etc.
When this is done over the internet, the information (TCP/IP packets) is sent in plain text. It is not encrypted. Thus is it possible for someone to "sniff" and view this information. Keep in mind that you have to be a target of a hacker and he needs special access to your network or router before he can sniff your packets. But it is possible and thus communications in plain text is considered highly unsecure, especially for businesses and companies with sensitive data.
TLS and SSL offer standard and highly supported methods to encrypt the information making it extremely difficult for anyone to compromise your system.
Transport Layer Security (TLS) is a method to protect the login or authentication (AUTH) process using encryption of the user id and password. The client software must support it if TLS is to be used. Wildcat! offers TLS in all the servers except the WEB Server (It will be implemented in a future WEB version using alternative login methods not necessarily related to TLS)
Secured Socket Layer (SSL) is a method to secure the entire client/server session by encrypting the socket layer (actual connection "pipe") between the end-user and hosting server, hence the entire session with the end-user (login and data) is secured using encryption.
By far, SSL is the most widely used method for internet security, especially with a WEB server, because it offers both login and data exchange security. TLS only offers security for the login process.
For SSL operations under Wildcat!, you must prepare Wildcat! properly to use SSL. More specifically, SSL requires a trusted security certificate from a CA vendor. You can use the Wildcat! SSL Configuration tool to prepare Wildcat! for SSL operations. You can also use the tool to create certificates.