Secure Access

Today secure comunication and secure access to network resources is very important. Only with secure connections the risk of password sniffing can be minimized. Here the possibilites for secure access from a users perspective is given.

HTTP

Unfortunatly our package at hetzner restricts the number of ips we can use to one. Because each secure web server is bound to a unique ip or port it is only possible to provide one secure web server (https). On our server all secure communication takes place on secure.incunabulum.de”:https://secure.incunabulum.de.

From the index page of this domain the relevant services (see subdomains) can be accessed. This server uses a self signed certificate, which means that the user has to import and accept the certificate. Note that this does not (!) decrease the communication security but only shows the trustworthyness of the site being what it claims to be.

Mail

For mail transfer the following secure solutions are possible:

  • mails can be send using secure smtp. The user needs to authenticate against the smtp server with the complete username including the domain name (e. g. user@domain.com).
  • Reading mail is possible using the default pop3 and imap ports . In both cases TLS is used. This means that the mail client must connect to the standard ports for unencrypted pop3 / imap and issue the startTLS command to start an encrypted session. Unfortunatly this is currently not supported by mozilla. See this bug for progress on this issue.