I'm a budding website developer, so please bear with my ignorance.
Say I had to encrypt my website with HTTPS and I got sick of having to click "Continue" every time a warning came up about an untrusted certificate. I used this method to install my site's certificate.
Say the certificate I signed is issued by "xyz." Since the store is called "Trusted Root Certification Authorities," I assume that it trusts "xyz" as a certification authority. When my certificate is added to the store, does that mean that any certificate issued by "xyz" now is automatically trusted?
Or does installing an SSL certificate for a domain to "Trusted Root Certification Authorities" only make that one domain trusted?
The point is I want to ignore the warnings for my website in particular but do not want to ignore the warnings for any other website.
EDIT: I probably should elucidate on the exact procedure I used to create the certificate. The website is deployed on a Ubuntu 10.04 server with the default OpenSSL and Apache configurations. To create the certificate and key file, I simply used
# make-ssl-cert generate-default-snakeoil –force-overwrite
and left /etc/apache2/sites-available/default-ssl alone because the make-ssl-cert command wrote the two files to the same paths that the Apache configuration files point to. So I didn't even set up a certificate authority to generate my website's certificate from.
Does this change the scenario at all? What's the difference between installing a certificate created without a certificate authority as trusted root on a client, and installing a certificate created with one?
EDIT 2: Okay, it would be better if I were to narrow the question down as much as I could: Is it safe to ask others to install my certificate as trusted root if I secure the certificate for my website and make sure it never escapes? Will attackers ever be able to take advantage of my self signed certificate and target those who have installed it to their trusted certificate store?