Choosing an SSL Provider? 183
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."
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.
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:Support? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Buy a real SSL cert, with location info (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Impression (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 is who they say they are. This is the role of a notary, a private individual who is commissioned by the government to verify that people are who they say they are when documents are signed. Sounds like a profit-making enterprise to me.
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?
It's a wash (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:Buy a real SSL cert, with location info (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.
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.
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.
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.
Re:Buy a real SSL cert, with location info (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:What sort of support do you need? (Score:3, Insightful)