How do I create a public certificate for use with PayPal Encrypted Website Payments?

Before you can use Encrypted Website Payments, PayPal requires that you upload your public certificate to verify the authenticity of the encrypted code. PayPal recommends using OpenSSL to create your public certificate.

OpenSSL is freely available at openssl.org. If you‘re using Windows, download the Win32 version of OpenSSL. Once you‘ve downloaded OpenSSL and added it to your PATH, the certificate generation is a two-step process:

1. Create your private key. The OpenSSL command for doing this is openssl genrsa -out my-private-key.pem 1024 (replace my-private-key.pem with whatever you want to name your private key).
2. Create your public certificate. The OpenSSL command for doing this is openssl req -new -key my-private-key.pem -x509 -days 365 -out my-public-certificate.pem (replace my-public-certificate.pem with whatever you want to name your public certificate).

You‘re now ready to acquire your Certificate ID by uploading your public certificate to the PayPal site. To learn how to do so, see What is a Certificate ID and how do I get one?