Hello everyone my name is Sean Habing. First off thank you to Adrian who will be letting me add to his wonderful website. I will be blogging about programming, technology and other interesting items that affect the internet, which seems to be everything these days.  Today I will be covering SSL (Secure Socket Layer). For e-stores, online banking and other websites which require private data to be transferred from the client to the server nothing is more important then SSL.

What seems to be a common issue with most E-stores and websites is expired SSL, Self Signed SSL or just not having it at all.  In a rush to save money small e-stores try to avoid spending the $30 USD/Year as they believe it's not important.  What they fail to grasp is that SSL protects their customers data by encrypting it and sending it through a secure connection.

The other way smaller stores seem to cheap out on purchasing SSL is to use "Self Signed" certificates. These are basically generated by their server and not by a Root Certificate Authority.  This causes most browsers to throw a flag saying "Invalid Certificate".  Now normally there is nothing wrong with this, however hackers have been known to use this as a means to exploit the connection to steal private information.  It can also cause havoc with ASP programming which will not allow a connection to a Self Signed certificate unless its also part of the "Local System Trusted Certificates" in Windows.  Which I have run into a few times since working in a Microsoft shop.

From a pure aesthetics side, if a customer sees a warning on their way to purchase a product they are going to stop and ask themselves "what is wrong here" and probably not complete the purchase.

Conclusion:

That's it, hope you enjoyed! If you have any questions please leave a comment!

For a great technical overview of SSL I recommend Wikipedia see this link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Sockets_Layer

Also for further reading do a quick Google search for SSL and this will offer tons of insight on how it works on Linux and Windows servers!

About the Author

Sean Habing is a web developer, project manager and general IT geek (B. Sc. Comp Sci, A+ Certified, Business Analyst Certificate). Sean currently works as a Client Support Analyst for a Canadian software company. He also runs his own company Oncall Software. It is his goal to inform people about technology while providing industry insight into common issues and problems. He also likes muscle cars. 

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