What is SSL certificate authority? Who has certificate authority? SSL cerficates are a must for your ecommerce website security. Choosing the best SSL certifcate from proper certificate authority is important. Keep reading for information on certifcate authority.

If you have a business Web site, you have probably noticed that you have an SSL certificate. These SSL certificates serve two important purposes that protect customers visiting your ecommerce Web site:

1.      Verifying your identity: First of all, the SSL certificate states who you are. This way, your customers feel confident that they are dealing with your company, and not with an imposter trying to steal personal information – especially payment information.

2.      Securing transactions: SSL stands for “Secure Sockets Layer”. Accessing a special Internet port (443), SSL provides special encryption that protects sensitive information. A secure communication channel, along with encoded information, is used to make sure that people trying to intercept payment information have a very hard time extracting useful data.

Your customers won’t trust you if you do not have an SSL certificate. In fact, if you do not have an SSL certificate, your customers will be warned, via a browser message, that your ecommerce Web site is not secure, and that their information could be compromised. SSL certificates are obtained from third parties that have been entrusted with the job of issuing certificates that ensure privacy and security. However, not anyone can just issue an acceptable SSL certificate. The certificate must come from a certificate authority.

What is a certificate authority?

A certificate authority is often (but not always) a trusted third party. This is a party that is trusted by both parties involved in a transaction. The trusted third party is separately trusted and helps interactions go through. Cryptography is most often used to facilitate these transactions. A certificate authority may sell its services to the public. Examples of these types of certificate authorities are VeriSign, Thawte, GeoTrust, GoDaddy and Comodo and others. You pay to have your ecommerce Web site protected, and the certificate authority issues you a certificate and encrypts transactions between your Web site’s server and the browser your customer is using to make purchases.

A certificate authority does not always have to be someone who sells their services. There are some authorities that issue their certificates for free, allowing anyone to get free SSL encryption. However, it is a matter of trust. Some certificate authorities are more well known by the public and are therefore better trusted. If a browser doesn’t recognize the authority, it may pop up, asking the customer to agree to take on the risk of moving forward with a transaction on a site that may not be as protected as one would like.

Governments and other institutions may issue their own certificates. It is also possible for you to issue your own SSL certificate, but many browsers will post a warning in such cases; few savvy online shoppers are willing to take the word of company that issues its own certificate. The whole point of a certificate authority is that it is someone else who can verify that you are who you say you are, and that you are providing a secure place to do online business.

What does a certificate authority do?

A certificate authority will take some steps to verify your identity. While not full-proof, the process does add a little more legitimacy to your claims of who you are. But the most important thing a certificate authority does is protect secure transactions. The certificate authority encrypts information. This means that it takes payment information – like credit card numbers – and changes it into a random string of characters. To someone intercepting the communication, it makes no sense. The certificate authority also issues a key. This key is used to decode the transaction. Only a party with the proper key can make sense of the information. For everyone else, it’s useless.

The encryption used these days is 128 bit encryption. This means that the encryption uses 128 pieces of information. The possible combinations of this information – and the possible combinations to find the key – are so huge that most computers cannot crack the code. And using an attack that tries every possible combination (more than a billion trillion possibilities) is impractical.  Some trying to steal the information has to be very lucky indeed to stumble upon the key that will give them the power to decode the message.

In the end, it comes down to trust. Customers are not likely to trust you to keep their sensitive payment information secure if you do not have an SSL certificate issued by a trusted authority. It may cost you some money every year to provide this protection, but it is usually worth it.

Related Article: 128 Bit vs. 256 Bit Encryption >>