Secure Data - SSL Certificates
Keeping information secure on the Internet is not a trivial task. The Internet was not designed to hide data: instead, data is sent with no protection at all from snooping. With the development of the World Wide Web, and the growth of e-commerce, the need for protecting customer information, including personal data such as address, credit card numbers, and identity numbers became critical. A number of techniques were developed, but one has become a standard for the Web: SSL.
When you connect to a web server from your browser, the connection is almost always without any protection at all. However, most e-commerce sites have adopted SSL as a way of protecting both their customers and their own information. You can tell when SSL is in use by the URL changing to “https” instead of “http” and the lock icon appearing on the browser window. On newer browsers, the entire URL entry field turns green to show when an SSL connection is in place.
But what is SSL? And, more importantly, how do you set up your own web server to use SSL? That’s what we’ll look at here.