Finding the Perfect SSL Certificate Provider

You should know that people who make a living with digital fraud are getting more opportunity than ever before. The reason is that businessess are going to online solutions everyday.Hackers can easily infiltrate unprotected connections between a user and a website to obtain information. The fraudster getting access to personal information, banking information, and credit card numbers is an unwanted scenario that will hurt both the customer and the online merchant.

Fortunately, a way to ensure secure transactions between a server like a merchant website and a browser has been invented. It's called the Secure Socket Layer (SSL) protocol. SSL is currently the leading method used to secure online transactions.

Understand How SSL Works

An SSL certificate contains a public encryption key, the name of the certificate provider, and the name of the certificate owner. The server sends this certificate to a requesting browser. By contacting the certificate provider, the browser then verifies wether the certificate really belongs to the named owner, and if the certificate is currently active. If the certificate checks out, the browser will encrypt all outgoing messages using the public encryption key. The encrypted message may only be decrypted by the server's private key.

Certificates are sold by companies called SSL certificate providers. Aside from selling SSL certificates, they also maintain a database of certificate owners with their identifying information as well as a list of active and revoked certificates.

What to Look for in SSL Certificate Providers

The most important feature to look for in providers is security. The security of the connection is often refered to by SSL providers as "encryption strength". It is measured by the total of bits in the key used to decode the encryption. The industry minimum nowadays is 128 bits, though many servers are using 256-bit keys. If you do the math, 128 bit have about 2128 possible key combinaitons. On the other hand, there are 2256 in 256-bit keys. Experts say that it's almost impossible to crack 256-bit keys even by brute-force attacks.

Browser recognition is the second most important feature. All web browser recognize a list of SSL certificate providers by default. You might have experienced instances when your internet browser warns you about a certificate from an unrecognized certificate provider. This happens when the certificate does not come from a provider included in the list. In many cases, this warning scares away potential customers from merchant websites. Browser recognition is commonly referred to as "browser ubiquity". Most browsers do not recognize, by default, SSL certificate providers with low ubiquity. 99% ubiquity is the minimum standard nowadays. In other words, default recognition by 99% of all web browsers.

You should also take note of another feature: browser recognition. If you've been spending all this money, you'd surely like your customers to know that your website uses SSL security, right? The green address bar in the user's browser is the most common way that SSL certificate providers do this. Some will even give a smal clickable logo that links to the provider's website. There, the customers can verify for themselves that the website they are viewing is using SSL security.

Other SSL certificate providers will offer other features and services. For example, automatic renewals and even malware scanning, but finding the perfect one shouldn’t be too difficult if you keep these tips in mind