[ Thanks to Linux Box Admin for this
link. ]
“Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) is the backbone of e-commerce on the
web. It is the protocol used to encrypt communications between a
web browser and web server, though it can also be used for other
applications. To use SSL on your own web server, you often need to
deal with an external company called a certificate authority (CA).
Three major considerations come into play when choosing a CA:
trust, audience, and cost.“SSL was created by Netscape to enable secure e-commerce and
rapidly became a defacto standard. SSL uses public key encryption
methods to verify the authenticity of a server or client and
encrypt communications between them…”