Need for SSL
- The clients/visitors feel secure in dealing with secure sites.
Ninety-three percent of online shoppers surveyed by VeriSign (a CA issuer) reported that they felt it important for an e-commerce site to include a trust mark of some kind on their site.
- If the personal data is hacked and misused in any manner, the victims can resort to legal process which can mean loss of face, trust and confidence in business.
- A research suggests that having a
recognizable SSL certificate may, in fact, have a direct correlation to increased e-commerce sales. Customers are more comfortable shopping on those sites and have fewer abandoned shopping carts and better repeat purchases.
Caution:
SSL does not protect server or software installed from attacks/malicious hacks, which can be protected by firewalls, virus checkers, Apache and IIS user and password protection for directories and files.
Ways to obtain a SSL Certificate
(A) Can buy one from a
certificate vendor (encryption type of 40-bit, 128-bit and 256-bit are offered, please check out with the sites for latest updates):
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Verisign (
www.verisign.com)
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Comodo (aka: InstantSSL) (
SSL Certificate Free SSL Secure Server SSL Certificate Comodo SSL™ ,
www.comodogroup.com)
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Thawte (
www.thawte.com): Web Server Certificates and 128-bit SuperCert
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GoDaddy SSL (
www.godaddyssl.com): Turbo, High-Assurance, Wildcard
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GeoTrust (
GeoTrust: SSL Certificates From a Leading Certificate Authority or
RapidSSL: Free SSL Certificates, Wildcard SSL, QuickSSL )
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Baltimore (
Baltimore.com: Your on-line destination for information on Baltimore hotels, restaurants, tickets, and businesses.)
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Entrust (
PKI, (Public Key Infrastructure), Outsourced and Managed PKI Software Services by Entrust. Entrust Provides Multi-Factor Authentication and Strong Two Factor Authentication for Online Transactions. Entrust's Internet Transaction Monitoring Platform p)
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ipsCA (
SSL Certificates SSL Wildcard SSL Free Certificates SSL Server Certificate 256 bits)
(B) Can sign certificate oneself via both
open source and proprietary tools; might save time and expenses of going to certificate vendor. Though, not recommended, as similar to issuing oneself a license that has not been verified/recognized by some central authority, Also, data might be encrypted, a warning shall indicate that certificate is not recognised.
(C) If
own a server, require to generate a
CSR (Certificate Signing request) – a block of encoded data generated by web server and contains necessary details about domain and organization.
If on a shared hosting, requires the host to raise a CSR