Secure Web Services

3SL is pleased to announce the introduction of secure HTTPS support in our website. This provides secure communications between you and 3SL’s web services:

Our website

Sending requests and enquiries to 3SL

Our FTP server

Logging support calls with 3SL

Customer records of support calls logged with 3SL

Secure Website

You can continue to access our website in the usual way through the URL:

http://www.threesl.com

which will access the site through potentially insecure HTTP.

Alternatively, you can access the site through secure HTTPS using the URL:

https://www.threesl.com

Using HTTPS ensures that all interactions between you and our website are secure. Whilst this may not matter when you browse the site and download materials from it, you may prefer to use secure communications if you are sending information to 3SL, for example if you:

Send a general request to 3SL

Send an evaluation request to 3SL

Secure Access to 3SL FTP Server

For those customers that have login accounts on our FTP server, you can continue to access the server over potentially insecure HTTP using the URL:

http://www.threesl.com/secure

and login with the username and password provided by 3SL.

Alternatively, you can access our FTP server over secure HTTPS using the URL:

https://www.threesl.com/secure

and login with the username and password provided by 3SL.

Using HTTPS to access our FTP server ensures that any information that you send to 3SL is secured. This may be particularly important if you are sending us data so we can diagnose a problem that you may have in your use of Cradle, or if you are sending us sensitive data that you wish us to use in a project where we are collaborating.

Support Calls

If your login account in our website has been marked as a customer account, you can view all of the support calls that your organisation has logged with 3SL. This list of calls is updated daily, and shows the latest status of each support call and, when it has been resolved, the solution statement for the call.

If your login account has been marked as a site representative, you can log new support calls with us directly through the website. Once such new calls have been received and logged by 3SL, they will be assigned a call number and an acknowledgement is sent to you by e-mail. Such new calls will appear in the call list shown by the website in the next day’s update.

Since the details of your new and existing support calls are likely to contain information that is specific to you, your organisation, your project, or simply your use of Cradle, 3SL has a duty and a responsibility to safeguard this information. We take this responsibility very seriously.

Therefore, irrespective of whether you have accessed our website through HTTP or HTTPS, as soon as you enter the customer area to view your support calls or to log new ones, you will automatically be switched to HTTPS to secure both the display of your information and any information that you may send to us.

HTTPS Certification

All HTTPS communications are authenticated with a certificate that your web browser tests before it initiates the encrypted HTTPS dialogue with a web server.

Currently, we have generated our own certificate for HTTPS communications with our web server. In principle, our certificate is no different to those used by other secure websites (of course our certificate is labelled 3SL and other websites’ certificates relate to their respective companies and organisations), except that our certificate has not been issued by an issuing authority that your web browser recognises by default. This means that when you first access our website over HTTPS, your web browser will not automatically recognise our certificate as coming from an authority that it recognises. Instead, you will have to accept the certificate so that thereafter your web browser will automatically trust certificates from 3SL.

Internet Explorer

If you use Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, when you access our website over HTTPS for the first time, you will see the following alert:

If you select Yes, you will accept this certificate for this visit to our website, but you will see this message the next time that you visit us. If you select View Certificate, you will see the details of our certificate, which are:

You can explicitly install the 3SL certificate by selecting Install Certificate… in this dialogue and working through the short wizard that follows. This is a once-only operation, and causes 3SL to become accepted as an approved issuer of certificates by your web browser so that you will not receive alerts when you visit our website in the future.

If you subsequently want to remove 3SL as an approved issuer of certificates from your web browser, select:

Tools → Internet Options → Content → Certificates → Trusted Root Certification Authorities

and find www.threesl.com or 3SL or Structured Software Systems in the list and remove it.

Mozilla Firefox

If you use Mozilla’s Firefox, when you access our website over HTTPS for the first time, you will see the following alert:

We recommend that you select Accept this certificate permanently and select OK so that this is a once-only operation. Alternatively, you can simply accept the default option Accept this certificate temporarily for this session and select OK, but if you do, you will see this message every time that you access our website over HTTPS. If you select Examine Certificate, you will see the details of our certificate, which are:

Once you have accepted our certificate, your secure communications with us will begin automatically.

If you subsequently want to remove 3SL as an approved issuer of certificates from your web browser, select:

Tools → Options... → Advanced → Certificates → Manage Certificates

and find www.threesl.com or 3SL or Structured Software Systems in the list and remove it.