QBurst

Getting a Digital Certificate

In the age of phishing attacks, you need to prove to the users that you are who you say you are. A Digital Certificate, issued by a trusted Certificate Authority (CA), is akin to a valid Driver's License. Research suggests that sites that display a recognizable seal of trust from a trusted authority such as VeriSign gives confidence to users to do business with you. In addition, the certificate key is used to encode information send from the user's computer to your server. Encoding prevents the bad guys from seeing customer data like credit card number. Users will see a padlock sign on the browser when encrypted data is being transmitted from the browser.

The steps involved in getting a digital certificate are given below:

Generating Certificate Signing Request (CSR) and Private Key: Your private key and public key can be generated with CSR generators. CSR generator products are available online.
Sending the CSR to a CA: The public key is used to request for the certificate from the CA. When you enter the CSR, you can use your public key file. At the end of the process, an e-mail will be sent to you containing the certificate from the CA.
Installing Merged Certificate into Server: Retrieve the contents of your e-mail and merge the contents of your signed certificate with your private key file. Then install the certificate onto your web server.

Some of the popular third party certificate authorities are given below: