FIELD OF THE INVENTION

Embodiments of the present invention generally relate to establishment of trusted communications between entities. More particularly, at least some embodiments of the invention relate to systems, hardware, software, computer-readable media, and methods for automatically establishing trust between a client and a service.

BACKGROUND

Clients such as data protection services and appliances often have a need to communicate with a service, for example, that runs on a virtual infrastructure such as a cloud site. However, communications between the client and the service may not be trusted, or secure. This may be due to various circumstances.

For example, many of the services and other entities with which the client may need to communicate have self-signed trust certificates. That is, no trusted third party has vouched for the trustworthiness of the service and, instead, the service is essentially vouching for its own trustworthiness by using a self-signed certificate. Self-signed certificates are sometimes employed as a way to avoid the time, effort, and expense, that would be involved with generating a trusted certificate or obtaining a trusted certificate from a certification authority (CA).

There are a number of typical practices that are employed where self-signed certificates are involved. For example, programmers may employ a self-signed certificate but enable users to simply ignore it. This practice is problematic however, at least because it may make the system prone to server spoofing and other hacks. In other cases, the system may be configured to ask the user to verify the self-signed certificate. While this approach may be marginally better than enabling the user to simply ignore the self-signed certificate, most users typically do not verify the certificate, or even understand what they are supposed to do when they get a message asking for verification. Further, users may have no way to determine whether or not they should trust the self-signed certificate.

