Choosing an SSL Provider?

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."

RapidSSL is your friend

They have cheap 128-bit cert that have Root in almost all browsers. The only issue we have run into is windows mobile devices.

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

>They have cheap 128-bit cert that have Root in almost all browsers.

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.

depends on devices...

With more users accessing the web from mobile devices, certificate choice matters even more now. Motorola phones, for example, only have a verisign cert on them, so users will get annoying "untrusted site" warnings for sites with Equifax certs. Also, J2ME applications on these phones cannot connect to sites with non-verisign certs. This becomes a bigger problem for mashup java apps that try to access secure apis on multiple services. You end up greatly restricting how your service can be used if you go for a cheap, easy Equifax certificate.

Re:depends on devices...

Now ain't that a racket.
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.

What sort of support do you need?

How do you support a cert? They're pretty much set once delivered.

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?

How do you support a cert? They're pretty much set once delivered.

Typically that is true. However when we tried an EV-SSL chained certificate, it wouldn't recognize the trust chain and caused all sorts of problems. We tried dealing with the support people, but they were very unhelpful and would only deal with us over email. Since they appeared to be in the UK (and we in the US), it was very frustrating in dealing with them. In the end we gave up and went back to a root certificate.

Depends on priorities

What are your priorities?

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

Except that's a pretty good community and is more clueful and ethical than many of the for-money providers. The problem with CAcert is not on the support end, it's the fact that their root certificate is not distributed with current browsers. Each potential verificant would have to import their cert manually. Supposedly that's changing slowly with the Mozilla Foundation spelling out exactly what the audit process is to allow the inclusion of CAcert. We can but wait and hope. Personally I'd rather have community support for something like this.

Impression

I was under the impression that SSL providers had a hold on the "market" and didn't really need to provide that good support, but that is coming from someone who has never had to deal with that side of it. Here [web-hosting-top.com] is an aggregation of a bunch of providers though, beware it's an ugly page.

Re:SSL Monopolies, SubCAs, PKI use, and supply/dem

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.

SSL

We've used Geotrust since the beginning and have never had a problem. They are a bit more expensive than others, but we'll take the hit there for the good support.

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.

Rapid SSL Wildcard

Go with a Rapid SSL wildcard cert. It will take care of most external needs with a single cert. They have a self service model that works pretty well. Cost is very reasonable.

Buy a real SSL cert, with location info

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

Are you also amongst the group of people that think Extended Validation certificates are anything more than something to make Verisign more money?

Re:Buy a real SSL cert, with location info

I thought the main point of a SSL cert for most people was session encryption.

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?

Re:

I thought the main point of a SSL cert for most people was session encryption.

Don't forget about identifying the server at the other end. No point having ultra-mega-good encryption if it's with a MiTM.

Re:Buy a real SSL cert, with location info

I think you may be a little mixed up.

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.

Re:Buy a real SSL cert, with location info

I think you may be a little mixed up.

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.

Re:Buy a real SSL cert, with location info

To an end user there are three types of SSL certs:

those that error,
those which display a padlock
and those which make the address bar go green in their crappy browser.

Re:Buy a real SSL cert, with location info

I found SiteTruth's search worthless. I put in my own domain [roysdon.net] and it said it was suspect, no address listed on the website. Totally bogus information. One of the first links is to the AUP [roysdon.net] page, which contains the same address WHOIS has listed. Even if I search giving the AUP link, it cannot find the address. Further, it says no usable certification info - I could see it complain that it doesn't like my CA, but there cert works just fine in any non-Microsoft browser. I find this site worthless as it fails to provide valid information. I could see it complaining that my SSL cert (free for non-commercial, personal use) is a domain-only, but it doesn't, it just says, "No valid cert." Finally, just because something doesn't have a valid business behind it (as in a personal website/email hosting), doesn't mean it is invalid or worthless. Don't give me your money - I'm not asking for it.

Simply use a lock favicon for your website

Look at the "/." just before the http in your location bar. Just turn it into a lock icon for your website.

Digicert all the way

If you want good support, go with Digicert. Absolutely phenomenal support. You don't go through hold queues to get to some person god knows where. Usually the person who picks up the phone is the one that helps you and they know what they are talking about. I've been extremely happy with them.

SSL Shopper

SSL Shopper [sslshopper.com] has a great list of SSL certificate providers and reviews, as well as the ability to compare different providers side by side using their SSL wizard.

Thawte

You can't go wrong with Thawte..

Re:

... Revocation - I'm not sure enough customers will have had to deal with that to get enough feedback to make a judgement.

I run a small CA for a particular technology. My advice to the manufacturers obtaining certs is "Don't compromise your keys!". Revocation is painful.