You have eCommerce website and you need to implement SSL (secure socket layer) certificate on your commercial website then have two options either buy SSL Certificate issued by Trusted Certificate Authority or you can issue Self-signed certificate for yourself. SSL Certificate can be issued by anybody using freely available software like Open SSL or Microsoft’s Certificate Services manager. This SSL Certificates are known as self-signed SSL Certificate.
The main difference between both certificates is your browser can easily identify your SSL Certificate. When your browser finds the http connection with a server with the self-signed certificate the user will have security alert message. This alert message informs the user that the Certificate has not been issued by an organization that the user can trust. This type of message is not suitable for commercial websites.
Thus, self-signed SSL Certificate is not right option for ecommerce websites, which involved money transaction. In order to get rid of this message the SSL Certificate must be signed by Certificate Authority. This Certificate Authorities are third party entity that verifies the identity of an online business and then guarantees for that identity through the issuance of the Digital Certificate.
Certificate Authority issues and manages the SSL certificates. DigiCert, Thawte, GeoTrust, RapidSSL and Comodo are such Trusted Certificate Authorities. Commercial sites without having SSL certificate issued by trusted Certificate Authority can lose the traffic and can lose the business. The customer feels safe when they are dealing with the site having SSL certificate.
SSL Certificate issued by trusted Certificate Authorities do not display such security alert message and creates a secure link between website and browser. In such conditions, the lock icon called padlock signifies the user has an encrypted link with a company who has been verified by trusted Certificate Authority.
To encrypt transmission from the server, the customer receives a public key server. Integrity (no privacy) of the keys is very important to the success of SSL security. If its own public key replaces with the third party, that “man-in-the-middle” can see all traffic, or modify data in transit. Both the customer and the server detect the interruption.
To avoid this, server sends the public key in the certificate signed by a CA. that digital signature check by costumers. If the signature is legitimate, the customer knows the CA confirmed that this certificate is a server’s authentic, not fake certificates “man-in-the-middle”.
If you are looking stronghold for online transactions over the Internet, select the Trusted CA. It is important that the users feel secure to connect to a site to claims to be safe. It is vital that they believe that their data send and receive have not been modified or accessed by unauthorized third parties.
