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What's the difference between a simple certificate and something higher-grade? What does the simple certificate lack that a higher grade certificate provides?
by RyanMcGreal 15y ago
What's the difference between a simple certificate and something higher-grade? What does the simple certificate lack that a higher grade certificate provides?
- JoachimSchipper 15y agoExtended verification certificates (EV; "actually verified") cause the browser bar to turn green. That will make people more likely to trust you.
- RyanMcGreal 15y agoThanks for clarifying! Will a free StartSSL certificate trigger an 'untrusted source' warning from the browser? Also, will a free certificate be adequate for encrypting authentication data in a web API?
- JoachimSchipper 15y agoStartSSL is completely fine for those goals. Pretty much the only effect of an EV certificate is the green bar. (Which is easily worth $150/yr if you're doing millions in e-commerce, of course!)
- RyanMcGreal 15y agoExcellent - thank you!
- RyanMcGreal 15y agoBy the way, I went ahead and got a free StartSSL certificate. So far it seems to work fine. Thanks again for your feedback.
- ifyouwillit 15y agoshould be ok for a web API, but for an e-commerce site, you'll likely want a recognized CA.
- CarlHoerberg 15y agostudies has shown that people dont know what the green bar actually means: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_Validation_Certificate#cite_ref-7 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_Validation_Certificate... imho a extremely overrated (and overpriced) features, which imposes no extra security what so ever.
- ck2 15y agoExactly! In fact the change to green out of the ordinary lack of it might make them think something is WRONG, not better. These are users who also keep their browser sessions going forever and therefore session cookies never expire - thereby making what was supposed to make something more secure, exactly the opposite.
- pm24601 15y agoCarl, You are pointing to a study that was published in 2006. This means the actual data is at least 7 years old. Can you find a more current example?
- mike-cardwell 15y agoThe free one also wont work with wildcard certs, and will only accept one hostname in the subjectAltName field. My domain is "grepular.com", the certificate needs to contain "secure.grepular.com" for historical reasons. This means, when I use startssl, I can't include "www.grepular.com" in the cert. Unless I pay for a cert.