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PayPal Changes for SHA-256 Certificates

I receive emails from PayPal about the changes that they bring about support for SHA-256 certificates, and warns that I may have to update the information on my website.

I use the IPN PayPal service that I initially set up on my website (all the user PHP codes I wrote, no pre-built shopping carts), and since 2008 it has been working quite successfully.

My hosting is shared hosting because it is not a very large or busy website. The hosting platform that runs PHP 5.2.17, Apache 2.2.3 (CentOS) and OpenSSL 0.9.8e-fips-rhel5 on July 01, 2008 (I got all this information from the phpinfo () PHP function).

Do I believe that any changes that need to be made will have to be done by my web host, since I cannot update any software on the server?

When I initially set everything in 2008, I remember how I downloaded the certificate from PayPal and used OpenSSL on my Windows PC to create something (another certificate? I don’t know), which I then uploaded to my website and used for encryption my paypal payment requirements. Does SHA-256 change that PayPal affects this? Do I need to redo the certificate or something else?

I tried using the IPN simulator (after changing the endpoints that my IPN handler uses), but I cannot get it to work, because the IPN simulator gives me a 502 Bad Gateway error, and I have no idea what this means that the problem may be .

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Even if your site does not use HTTPS anywhere, you will still need to check the certificate compatibility with this update.

When your IPN script receives PayPal messages and sends them back to PayPal for verification, this server-to-server connection should be protected, since the PayPal IPN endpoint has HTTPS, which means the default store / store on your web server should contain certificates, compatible with SHA-2, to establish SSL-confirmation.

OpenSSL 0.9.8 supports SHA-2 by default, but it's still worth checking the compatibility of your server by simply specifying the IPN script endpoint from www.paypal.com to www.sandbox.paypal.com (because the sandbox environment made the SHA-2 update already) and send a POST IPN message to your listener (with IPN simulator)

OR SSH to your server and run the command:

 openssl s_client -connect www.sandbox.paypal.com:443 -showcerts -CApath /etc/ssl/certs/
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