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

Before you can use Encrypted Website Payments, we require that you upload your public certificate to verify the authenticity of the encrypted code. We recommend 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 three-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 the desired name of 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 your desired name for the public certificate).
  3. Upload your certificate. Follow the instructions on how to generate your public certificate.

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