| Digital Certificates are issued by a Trusted Third Party Program (TTP)
such as Equifax Secure, Thawte or Verisign, among others. The TTP is a
public company which provides us with a Digital Certificate. The TTP requires
an extensive amount of documentation in order for our company to prove
we are indeed a legitimate company.
The Digital Certificate establishes our credentials when processing
business transactions on the web. The actual certificate, which is issued
with a serial number by a Certification Authority (CA) contains our credentials,
our name, the certificate's expirations dates, a copy of our certificate
holder's public key (certifies we encrypt* all our data), and the digital
signature of the issuing authority in order to verify that the certificate
is real and valid.
Moreover, we must re-apply for the Digital Certificate yearly, thus
providing yearly documentation on the validity of our company. Digital
Certificates are kept in registries so authenticating users can look up
our public keys for verification.
* We encrypt our data with the Highest Grade SSL security (Secure Socket
Layers) available: RC4 with 128-bit secret key. |
