A sea change in HTTPS web encryption is coming and it’s free

Achieving HTTPS everywhere has been a goal for years now. Spearheaded by Google, security experts agree that it just makes more sense to push all communication as encrypted traffic. To do that, servers use an SSL certificate to encrypt and sign the transmission and prove the identity of the server, preventing forgery or hijacking. In order for that SSL certificate to be trustworthy however, it must be approved, signed, and issued by a trusted certificate authority (CA). 

Becoming a certificate authority is no simple task. It can take years and hundreds of thousands of dollars. As such, the certificate authorities are in it to make a profit by selling their trusted certificates to each domain that wishes to encrypt their traffic to the public. These trusted certificates range from as little as $20/year to as much as $2,000/year for each domain name you want to secure.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here