Prosper202 With HTTPS SSL As I mentioned in my previous Prosper202 tutorial on the “10 Best Practices To Securing Your Prosper202 Installation“, I would eventually post a tutorial on how to get Prosper202 to play nice with an SSL server once I had finished some more testing.

We’ll I think I’ve figured it out.

Word of Caution: Before attempting any of the steps mentioned below, I HIGHLY recommend you setup a 2nd Prosper202 install from which to test on. Do not do this on a production installation.

Why user Prosper202 with SSL?

Without getting into too much of the “techno-babble”, SSL provides your sessions with encryption. This means that when you login to your Prosper202 account, your login information will be encrypted, instead of being sent to the server in clear text.

Also, you’ll have the sneaky advantage of totally blanking out your referrer, bwahahaha.

By default, Prosper202 can cloak your referrer when the cloaking options are turned on, but this still passes the domain of your Prosper202 install to your CPA network. They won’t see your landing pages of course, but they will still be able to see that all the traffic comes from domain “tracking.xyz.com” for example.

When using cloaking in conjunction with HTTPS tracking links, your referrer will be blanked, and your CPA network won’t have any idea where the traffic is coming from. Stealthly eh?

Here’s what you need to do:

1) Purchase and assign a dedicated SSL cert to your current Prosper202 domain
Some webhosts will provide an SSL cert with your hosting package. If they don’t, you’ll have to contact them directly and purchase one.

2) Install Prosper202 on your HTTPS domain
Follow the normal Prosper202 Installation Guide.

3) Modify your .htaccess to force the use of https port 443
(may vary depending upon your webhost)

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} !^443$

4) Modify References of HTTP to HTTPS
The easiest way to change all references to https is use a program like UltraEdit. Using the “Search, Find In Files” feature, you will need to open your local Prosper202 files, do a find and replace of “http://” with “https://”

There are simply too many lines that needed to be changed to list every single file and line that you need to modify. Doing a find and replace will work, but you’ll need to modify a few references back to “http”.

References to the Extra Resources links in the sidebar, the footer, images, and the Prosper202 RSS feed will all not work unless you change their URLs back to “http”. Once again, fire up UltraEdit, then do another find and replace of the specific links needing to be changed.

For example, references to Prosper202.com would have been changed to https. To change them back, find and replace “https://prosper202.com” with “http://prosper202.com”. Do the same for references to Worldproxy202, Meetup202, etc. Modify links in the footer in the file “template.php”.

5) Upload and Overwrite Your Modded Prosper Files
Simply upload your changed files over the existing files on your server. If you are currently  tracking a large volume of profitable campaigns with Prosper202, I suggest you do all of the recommended steps on a test server first. (downtime can be a bitch)

6) Login To Your HTTPS Prosper202 Domain
If everything went as planned, you should be able to login to your newly secured Prosper202 installation (now with SSL encryption). You can verify your server’s SSL cert is working by clicking on the “gold padlock icon” within the status bar in Firefox. (See screenshot)

Prosper202 SSL Cert Verification

Prosper202 SSL Cert Verification

7) Run a Test Campaign
I’d advise setting up and running a test campaign. Check that all looks normal, and that your sources, keywords, ads, etc are all properly tracking. Note that when generating your tracking links in step 7, you should now see “https://” in front of them.

8) Install the Firefox plugin “RefControl”
You can use RefControl to watch and/or change the referrer. Play with different settings to verify that links sent through HTTPS are showing “no referrer” in the statusbar. You can also log into your CPA network and see that the referrer is blanked (if they provide this too you).

HTTPS tests in Firefox have worked great. In IE7, the browser warns the user of a certificate error, which I am still looking into. Not sure if this is specific to my machine, or IE7.

But overall everything has worked great so far (besides the IE7 issue)… Please thoroughly test before running live campaigns. I take no responsibility if you break your server!

Questions? Shoot!

- Enjoy and happy cloaking!

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Filed under: Blackhat • Prosper202 • Tips & Tricks • Tutorials

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