In the rapidly expanding world of electronic commerce, security is paramount. Fear of fraud continues to haunt online retail — keeping millions of consumers from buying online. Aussie Interconnect's Secure Certificate Services provide customers with an easy, cost-effective and secure means to protect consumer information and build trust.

Although online shopping is increasingly pervasive, millions of potential customers still balk at releasing their credit card numbers to online entities. Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificates on Web sites provide an effective, reliable and visible method of securing sensitive customer information. An SSL certificate ensures customers that online transactions on SSL-secured sites indeed are safe.

About SSL Certificates

An SSL certificate is a certificate that authenticates the identity of a Web site to visiting browsers and encrypts information for the server via SSL technology. When a browser user wants to send confidential information to a Web server, the browser will access the server's digital certificate.

The certificate serves as an electronic passport that establishes an online entity's credentials when doing business or other transactions on the Web.

A digital certificate contains the following information:

• The certificate holder's name
• Serial number
• Expiration date
• Copy of the certificate holder's public key
• The digital signature of the certificate-issuing entity

Because only the Web server has access to its private key, only the server can decrypt SSL-encrypted information.

How SSL Works

How an SSL certificate secures an online transaction:

• When accessing an SSL-secured Web site, the user's browser sends a message to the Web server, requesting a secure session
• The Web server responds by sending the user its server certificate (which includes its public key)
• The user's browser will verify that the server's certificate is valid and has been signed by a CA whose certificate is in the browser's database. It will also verify that the CA certificate has not expired
• If the certificates are all valid, the user's browser will generate a one-time session key and encrypt it with the server's public key. The user's browser will then send the encrypted session key to the server so that they will both have a copy
• The server will decrypt the message using its private key and recover the session key

This completes the SSL handshake process, and a secure SSL connection has been established. The entire process of establishing the SSL connection happens transparently to the user and takes only seconds.

A key or padlock icon in the browser's status bar indicates that the browser is running in secure mode.

SSL is supported in the vast majority of browsers and Web servers on the market.