Basic Steps to Assist You To Select the Best SSL Certificate Provider

As you know, the incidence of online fraud is constantly increasing. This is because businessess are going to online solutions everyday.Hackers can easily infiltrate unprotected connections between a user and a website to obtain information. Personal information, banking information, and credit card numbers may easily fall into the wrong hands, potentially hurting both the customer and the online merchant.

The Secure Socket Layer (SSL) protocol was invented to ensure secure transactions between a server, usually a merchant website, and a browser. Experts will tell you that SSL is the most effective way to secure oline transactions.

How Does SSL Work?

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. The browser then contacts the certificate provider to validate whether the public key really belongs to the owner indicated on the certificate. If it checks out, all outgoing message will be encrypted by the browser using the public encryption key in the certificate. Only the server, by using its private decryption key, can decrypt the message.

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". How is encryption strength measured? By counting the total number of bits used to decode an encryption. The industry minimum nowadays is 128 bits, though many servers are using 256-bit keys. A 128-bit key has 2128 possible combinations to the key. 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.

The next feature that you should always have in mind is broswer recognition. All web browser recognize a list of SSL certificate providers by default. In case the browser is presented a certificate that is not given by one of these providers, a warning message will pop up warning the user of an unrecognized SSL certificate provider. Put yourself in a customer's shoes. Won't you get scared away if you get this warning? SSL certificate providers call this feature "browser ubiquity". Low ubiquity SSL certificate providers are not recognized by default by most browsers. It’s recommended to go for at least 99% ubiquity. In other words, 99% of all web browsers will recognize the SSL certificate provider by default.

Browser indication is also important, especially to commercial websites. Why? Because you want to increase your customer's confidence in using your website by letting them know that all transactions are done with SSL security. SSL certificate providers usually do this by turning the browser’s address bar green. 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.

Many SSL certificate providers offer numerous other features like automatic renewals and malware scans. By keeping the tips you've learned in this article, you should be all set to finding the perfect provider.