Digital Certificate Program

Board of Regents Digital Certificate Program

The Board of Regents (BoR), through the Office of Information and Instructional Technology, has offered a digital certificate [defined] program to University System of Georgia (USG) institutions for approximately two years, working with GeoTrust (a root certificate authority). The BoR GeoTrust certificate program allows technical contacts at USG institutions to request one-year, 2048-bit standard digital certificates (typically used to encrypt Web traffic) at a cost of $91 per certificate per server (up to four servers using the same certificate for redundancy/high availability). At the present time, multi-year and specialized (wildcard, code-signing, etc.) certificates are not part of the BoR Certificate Program. The University of Georgia, through the Office of the CIO and Enterprise Information Technology Services, has started participating in this program in April 2009.

In order for technical staff in UGA departments to request digital certificates through the BoR Certificate Program, they must follow the BoR Certificate Program Technical Contact Registration Process (described in next section). This process includes verification from a departmental billing contact that the technical contact is authorized to request digital certificates through this program.

Once a technical contact has been approved by a billing contact, an account will be created in the BoR Certificate Request System for that individual. Certificates requested by technical contacts through the BoR Certificate Request Process (link in next section) will beapproved by the UGA Certificate Administrator upon receipt of an email from the departmental billing contact by the UGA Certificate Administrator authorizing the payment of the certificate fee. (IMPORTANT NOTE: If a certificate order needs to be cancelled, please email a cancellation request to ssladmin@uga.edu rather than contact the BoR or Geotrust directly.) The certificate will be emailed to the recipient within one business day from the time the certificate request has been made (assuming billing authorization is given). If anyone has questions regarding this program, please email the UGA Certificate Administrator: ssladmin@uga.edu.

BoR Certificate Program Technical Contact Registration Process

Follow these steps to register a UGA technical contact for the BoR GeoTrust certificate program:

  1. The technical contact needs to fill out the BoR Certificate Program Technical Contact Registration Form. This form (which requires MyID authentication) needs contact information (First and Last Name, E-mail Address and Phone Number) for the technical and billing contacts as well as the UGA unit (department, college, etc.) of the billing contact.
  2. Once the form has been submitted, an email will be sent to the UGA Certificate Administrator (UGA CA) indicating that a technical contact is requesting an account on the BoR certificate request system. A second email will be sent to the billing contact asking that individual to verify that the technical contact is authorized to request certificates for their unit by sending an email to the UGA CA.
  3. After the UGA CA has received authorization from the billing contact, an email will be sent to the BoR Certificate Administrator (BoR CA) requesting that the account for the technical contact be set up.
  4. The BoR CA will set up the account for the technical contact via a phone conversation with that individual.

When the account has been set up in the BoR certificate request system, the technical contact will be able to request certificates through the BoR Certificate Request Process.