What is Secure Socket Layer (SSL)?
SSL technology has become an industry standard for sending encrypted information securely across the Internet. It uses a powerful 128-bit encryption, which is the strongest encryption available. A web server with a SSL certificate has an URL address starting with https. When you first request a web page secured by SSL your browser and the web server establish secret keys used for the encryption/decryption process. Only your browser and the web server know the secret keys so that no one else can view your information by scanning the data packets as they travel across the Internet.
SSL stands for secure socket layer and was developed by Netscape as a means of providing encrypted secure communications links across the internet. It has now become an industry standard. A web server with an SSL certificate has a URL starting with https. The SSL certification ensures that the credit card data from your browser to our web server is passing through a secure tunnel. The data is encrypted by your browser, sent over the Internet in this encrypted format, and then decrypted by our server. Your browser and our server establish secret keys for the encryption/decryption when you first access a secure page. Only your browser and our server know the secrets so no-one can see your credit-card details by looking at the data packets being sent over the Internet. You can find out more by visiting Verisign’s SSL Basics page.
