KI 1559 Certificates for websites

2022-05-02 (updated 2025-04-30)

Certificates are used to secure the connection between a web browser and the website (HTTPS). This prevents third-parties from reading the data sent between browser and server.

Traditionally, getting a certificate for a website has meant asking the IT-department for one and a manual process of issuing, installing, maintaining and renewing certificates afterwards. Now that the lifetime of new certificates has been reduced to 1 year, it is because it has become possible to obtain and maintain certificates automatically, without human involvement. The only requirement is that the webserver has a DNS-entry and is publicly available from the internet.

The Let's Encrypt project offers free certificates this way. If you need a certificate for a service that is accessible from the Internet, we recommend that you utilize 'certbot', a tool for automatic issuing and renewal of certificates which can be used with both Let's Encrypt but also UiB's own provider of certificates. Certbot was made for this purpose, and has great documentation.

If you are in need of certificates for web servers which are not accessible from the internet, or other more complex setups, there are ways to use Certbot for these use cases too, which the IT-department can help you with.