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Secure Certificates: explained

A secure certificate is a document used to certify that an individual or organization is who they say they are. A certificate exposes to the public the true company name and full web domain name that the certificate is registered to and carries with it both creation and expiration dates. A secure certificate transmits data on the Secure Socket Layer (SSL) which encrypts the data using very long decryption strings and other encryption technology.

The strength of the encryption can vary but most commonplace is 128 bit, which is strong enough to prevent data from being deciphered even using the latest technology and hardware. Encryption of webpage data transmitted over the Internet protects the sender and receiver from being watched by other individuals and is essential to the prevention of credit card fraud and identity theft.

Secure Certificates are bound to a particular full web domain name such as the example links at the bottom of this page. This means that only one certificate is ever available in the world to one full domain name and this cannot be faked. Most common use of secure certificates is to transact secure payments over the internet (HTTP) to and from a payment processor gateway and Internet Merchant Accounts to take monetary payment for goods electronically sold.

Never send sensitive information such as credit card numbers over the internet without being in a secure environment.

How You Know

You can usually tell if you are within a secure webpage by looking for the following three things. The address bar where the URL of the website is displayed usually begins with HTTP:// which stands for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (the standard method of exchanging internet web-page data):

1. If you are within a secure connection there should be an "S" after the HTTP to represent SECURE.
2. If you are within a secure connection you should see a padlock or key at the bottom of your browser window.
3. Sometimes there are also logos indicating that the webpage is secure that allow you to click on them to verify. These logos and links should only be trusted in conjunction with the identification of the first two items. Use the above two methods when possible to verify that you are, indeed within a secure connection to the web page.

Try the following links and look for the items mentioned above to help identify when you are in a secure or insecure webpage environment.

Example:
Insecure URL http://www.verisign.com/
Secure URL https://www.verisign.com/