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Choosing an SSL Provider?
Posted by
kdawson
on Fri Apr 25, 2008 10:08 AM
from the who-you-gonna-trust dept.
from the who-you-gonna-trust dept.
An anonymous reader writes "I have recently been tasked with switching our SSL certificate provider and it's proving not to be easy. We use an internal authority for our own stuff and then we buy certificates to protect outward-facing sites (a lot of them). My question for this community is: How do you choose a certificate authority to use? There is price, service (why we're leaving our last vendor), warranty, and products offered as the only differentiators I can find. Is there any public resource that would show me actual customer reviews of CAs like Verisign, GeoTrust, Comodo, Trustwave, and DigiCert? Our last vendor did a really poor job with support and I would like to make a reasonably educated decision."
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Submission: Making the Switch, Choosing an SSL Provider by Anonymous Coward
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IT: When Is a Self-Signed SSL Certificate Acceptable? 627 comments
UltraLoser writes "When is it acceptable to encourage users to accept a self-signed SSL cert? Recently the staff of a certain Web site turned on optional SSL with a self-signed and domain-mismatched certificate for its users and encourages them to add an exception for this certificate. Their defense is that it is just as secure as one signed by a commercial CA; and because their site exists for the distribution of copyrighted material the staff do not want to have their personal information in the hands of a CA. In their situation is it acceptable to encourage users to trust this certificate or is this giving users a false sense of security?"
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RapidSSL is your friend (Score:5, Informative)
If you're just after a basic root cert, RapidSSL(Equifax) is your best bet. If you need the stronger, blood-of-your-first-born cert, Verisign is the place to go.
Regards,
Re:RapidSSL is your friend (Score:4, Informative)
Usually they are 1024 bit RSA with SHA-1 signing (80 bit). These are deprecated by NIST for use past 2010.
MS don't support SHA-256 signatures in XP, until SP3, which explains some of the delay in rolling out stronger roots.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
depends on devices... (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:depends on devices... (Score:5, Insightful)
Still secure but because Verisign obviously has a hand in the mobile distribution market, no one else is 'secure'.
I see is as the losers are the Motorola users tied to Verisign only certs.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Nope. RapidSSL is a brandname of Geotrust (which in turn is a brandname of Equifax). Geotrust also offers QuickSSL Premium certs, which are signed with the standard Equifax Secure CA root certificate, which, to my knowledge, is distributed with all mobile devices currently on the market.
The pricing for QuickSSL Premium certs is not much different from the bigger vendors, but the service we've gotten so far from Geotrust is excellent, and their simple no-nonsense verification systems means we get to deploy
What sort of support do you need? (Score:5, Interesting)
1) You make a cert request. Pay Money.
2) They verify your identity.
3) They sign your cert request and return it as a signed cert.
It's not like you can upgrade a v3 cert to v3.1.
Re:What sort of support do you need? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
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Support? (Score:2)
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Depends on priorities (Score:3, Insightful)
It sounds like service is pretty high up on the list. What about price?
There is everything from CACert.org, which offers free certs, but supported is limited to the community it serves, to budget providers to full-service providers like Verisign.
Do you need more than just a few certificates? Do you need someone to be available 24x7 for phone support or is e-mail support good enough? What do you need?
Like anything else in life, you decide based on what your needs are and how well that, in this case, a particular CA fits your needs.
Re:Depends on priorities (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Impression (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
I've thought for a long time that the answer to this problem is competition. What bugs me is why government hasn't gotten into the act. The purpose of an SSL certificate is to verify that the entity who owns the server you're communicating with
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SSL Monopolies, SubCAs, PKI use, and supply/demand (Score:3, Interesting)
In other words, I think the idea was probably that ISPs or other organisations would purchase bigISP.com certs, that allowed them to be certificate authorities too.
Then, an ISP's customers could go to THEM for certs. The customer's site cert would be signed by their CA; the ISP, and the ISP's in turn would be signed by the big names.
I think that does work. If so, then the problem is almost
Re:SSL Monopolies, SubCAs, PKI use, and supply/dem (Score:5, Insightful)
What you describe does work, though it gets annoying.
Basically, when your server negotiates SSL with the browser, it has to provide all the certificates in the trust chain that the browser doesn't have. So, bigISP.com has a certificate signing certificate from VeriSign, and signs a Web certificate for your company. Any time an SSL request comes in, your server has to present it's public certificate and the public certificate of bigISP.com's signing certificate. The browser already has VeriSign's public certificate signing certificate.
So, it's kind of like DNS resolution, where you have to "know" the root server, and then can build a chain down to get the actual name server to ask. But, in this case, you need a trust chain of signed certificates. With one or two layers, it's not _that_ big a deal...
The real downside is maintenance. Each layer has its own expiry, and you have to re-establish the chain whenever a certificate in it expires. That means new private certs and updating the public certs that are sent with the SSL transaction.
If, instead, your certificate is signed by a certificate for which there is a public key pre-loaded into the browser, you only have 1 certificate to update when it expires or when the signing certificate expires.
I use a self-signed certificate signing certificate for my home systems and for my department's SSL servers at work. But there's a very limited number of people who are supposed to access those servers, so they can be given the public signing certificate by hand. And even then, I wind up on vacation and unable to get to my IMAPS server because I forgot the signing certificate is going to expire on me....
So, keeping the chain short is actually worth-while, just from a maintenance perspective.
Parent
SSL (Score:3, Informative)
There was one year where we wanted to try the EV-SSL. We decided to go cheap and went with Comodo. Big mistake. It didn't work, and after dealing 2 weeks with the support people there, we gave up and went back to Geotrust. They would only talk to us via email and were generally very unhelpful. I'm not saying that is what everyone experiences, I'm simply stating our own.
Re: (Score:2)
We used them as well. Price was the main thing - we did a "bulk" type plan since we were trying to get a hold on all of our rogue cert purchasers. We also got a decent portal out of them to expedite certs for any pre-vetted domain.
Rapid SSL Wildcard (Score:5, Informative)
Buy a real SSL cert, with location info (Score:4, Insightful)
Buy a real SSL cert, one with "Location" (L field) information and a real business name (not a domain name) in the "Organization" (O field). Avoid those cheap "Instant SSL" "Domain Control Only Validated" certs.
At SiteTruth [sitetruth.com], we consider the low-end certs worthless. They don't provide any information about who you're dealing with. We encourage other developers of certificate-validation software to take a similar position. You don't want to input a credit card number to a site with a "domain control only validated" certificate. "Domain control only" validated certs are enough for logging into a blog, perhaps, but not more than that.
Re:Buy a real SSL cert, with location info (Score:5, Insightful)
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I certainly do - my first SSL cert from Thawte cost a fraction of the $900 an EV SSL certificate costs from them, and required utility bills, bank statements etc to verify my identity.
Identity can, and has, been validated in the same fashion as EV-SSL certificates for a fraction of the price in the past. If they wanted to establish identity they could, and for less than an EV-SSL cert costs at present.
In other areas of business, certificates of higher cryptographic strength go for less than $0.04 a cert in bulk. The processing time for a signing system using a modern processor and a HSM is less than 1 second. To maintain the old prices is daylight robbery.
Re:Buy a real SSL cert, with location info (Score:5, Insightful)
And the main reason we pay for one is so we get one the browser recognizes without throwing up a prompt about unrecognized certs that might be off-putting to a customer.
How many site visitors really look at the cert? Or care whether its got an company name or more. How many even KNOW there are different levels of cert? For most either the 'lock icon' is there or its not. They don't -check- the cert, or even know how?
Parent
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I thought the main point of a SSL cert for most people was session encryption.
And the main point of an SSL cert that isn't self-signed is to keep ISPs between the browser and the server from acting as a man in the middle and intercepting all communication. If you have some other reasonably secure infrastructure for distributing software to your customers, your company can distribute its own root cert for customers to install, leaving VeriSign and all the CAs it has acquired out of the loop.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
So _public_ users don't get a pop up prompt.
Nobody really gives a damn about the "other stuff" (e.g. real security, and even if users get a pop up, more than half the time they'll just click through
After all when CAs like Verisign issue "Microsoft" certs to nonmicrosoft people[1], and lots of sites still use Verisign (who are already known for _intentionally_ doing very dubious stuff), where's the security?
I
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Buy a real SSL cert, with location info (Score:4, Insightful)
The point of the encryption is transport layer security and privacy. The point of the certificate is TRUST. Having an encrypted session makes no difference if you are communicating with an impostor.
The prompt about unrecognized certs certainly SHOULD off-put the customer; it's likely to be that customer's only warning that the party on the other end of the connection isn't who it claims to be.
Parent
Re:Buy a real SSL cert, with location info (Score:5, Insightful)
No. Think soley in terms of the average web user.
The point of the encryption is transport layer security and privacy.
Right. And that's what the average user is interested in when they see 'secure login', the lock icon, or the https prefix. I don't think most users even know that https is guaranteeing WHO they are talking to at all.
The point of the certificate is TRUST. Having an encrypted session makes no difference if you are communicating with an impostor.
That's true. But beside the point. From an engineering perspective, yes, the reason for the cert is trust, and the signing chain to root CA's etc establish a chain of trust.
But in practical terms, the average user doesn't have the foggiest idea what this all means.
So as a website developer looking to satisfy customers demands, I might want to provide seamless encryption which the customer understands and wants; so I need an SSL cert because the browsers don't support seamless encryption without one. And the customer gets what they demand.
They also get some 'trust', but its a side effect of the good engineering that went into the system. The customer doesn't actually -check- the cert and verify who they are talking to. And if someone sent them a fishing email pointing at 'bankotamerica.com' instead of 'bankofamerica.com' as long as bankotamerica.com has at least a domain only cert that their browser accepts, and their lock icon comes on, they'd be satisified.
Parent
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Depends entirely on the reason you're putting together a cert. Cert's on web services are much more than just for encryption, they are the primary means of secure verification. Verizon, for instance, will only accept Verisign Certs for their automated repair services and the cert information has to match what was sent to Verizon in the setup process.
Re:Buy a real SSL cert, with location info (Score:5, Insightful)
those that error,
those which display a padlock
and those which make the address bar go green in their crappy browser.
Parent
Re:Buy a real SSL cert, with location info (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
It depends on your needs but (Score:2, Informative)
Simply use a lock favicon for your website (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Seriously what a torrent of bullshit. Certs are encryption keys, and the rest is just marketing.
Users don't even care so long as there is a padlock on their browser. The danger of this "money can buy trust" idea is that it just leads to escalation. If a yellow padlock is all too common and can be bought for $5.99 then next you will need a green tick that proves among other things that the company has given at least $999 to verisign.
I rate the firefox invalid ssl cert warning as insightful, and
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Digicert all the way (Score:3, Informative)
Your old provider (Score:2)
go with (Score:2)
SSL Shopper (Score:5, Informative)
It's a wash (Score:2, Insightful)
Thawte (Score:4, Informative)
Cheapest non-intermediate certs (Score:2)
If I have a multi-million dollar e-Commerce site, I'd use an EV cert from a VeriSign or similar company. For the other 99.99999% of uses, it'll be the cheapest certificate that is signed by a trusted root in the IE, FF, and Safari browsers. Don't care if it's domain validation only, as long as it works.
RapidSSL has been good for price, root signing, and the wildcard certs work we
Godaddy. And, SSL use will increase. (Score:3, Informative)
The cert auto renewed and I wasn't expecting that, but a ticket to their support center and I got it canceled and refunded. So pretty good service I think.
But watch out. The more that ISPs start filtering content, and the more that governments increase monitoring and censoring data on the web... you're going to see rising demand for SSL certs and rising instances of the, pay more money for a green url bar nonsense.
The SSL providers are trying to sell you on the idea that it's the cert that makes the site trustworthy. Meanwhile, all you really need the cert for is the encryption.
IE7 has succeeded in making shared certs utterly useless. Too bad for the little guy who was using the shared cert provided free from his hosting company, because you can no longer use it without an enormous frightening message from the browser.
Look for more of this to come.
Re: (Score:2)
You need both the encryption and the knowledge that the site on the other end is the one you intended to converse with.
One without the other isn't worth much.
May I ask ... (Score:2)
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StartCom - Free SSL (Score:2)
Godaddy (Score:3, Funny)