SSL Certificates Details

SSL, an abbreviation of ‘Secure Sockets Layer’ is a data encryption technology created by Netscape Communications in the mid 90’s that has been adopted as the leading protocol to successfully encrypt the transmission of data to and from millions of ecommerce websites on the Internet.

Why do you need an SSL Certificate?

– It establishes trust between you and your customers.
– It shows that you take their business seriously enough to protect their sensitive information such as credit card numbers, social security numbers, licenses and passwords.

– You make sure that all pages with private information on them that are protected by an ssl certificate run with HTTPS:// instead of HTTP:// in your browser, and displays a lock icon.

– You comply with security and privacy requirements laid down by credit card companies processing your transactions.

– You show a ‘site seal’ for your ssl certificate demonstrating that an ssl certificate is active on your website and that anyone can verify the security of your website.

Having an SSL certificate to encrypt communications on your website, effectively;

– Halts tampering with or changing the data contained in communications to and from your website.

Stops listening in and capturing sensitive information to and from your website.

– Blocks the substitution of bogus/forged communications being inserted into transmissions of data to or from your website.

SSL certificates need to be issued by an SSL Certificate Authority. This is usually a company that keeps track of the necessary information that the ssl certificate is based on and authenticates the identity of the ssl certificates owner.

In order to get an ssl certificate you must fill out all certificate information requested including the domain name the ssl certificate will be running on along with company name, address, city, state and country. The certification authority verifies that the person who is making the request for an ssl certificate on a domain is entitled to do so. For this the certificate authority sends out an email message to the owner of the domain name (administrative contact) whose details are stored in the whois database. When that email is replied to authorizing a new ssl certificate to be created, the certificate authority issues a public encryption key and a private encryption key to the new ssl certificate owner.

The public key’s information is used for a Certificate Signing Request (CSR) to validate the installation of the ssl certificate on the web server your domain (and website) is hosted on. The private key is installed on your webserver to match information contained within it to any request coming in and ensuring that data tranmissions are encrypted to and from your website with the web browser accessing your website.

SSL Certificates from Ballistic Domains are very affordable, offer industry standard 256 bit encryption, and can be issued in minutes.