Security on your web site is accomplished with the use of a digital certificate that provides a certified public and private key pair, and the use of the Secure Socket Layer (SSL) to authenticate transactions and encrypt information.
What is a Digital Certificate?

A digital certificate (digital ID) is very similar to your drivers licenses or passport, it is an electronic proof of your identity or your right to access information and services on-line.

Digital IDs link an identity with a pair of electronic keys that can be used to encrypt and sign electronic information. The digital ID must be issued by a recognized Certification Authority (CA) and signed with the CA’s private key. A digital ID contains the owner’s public key, owner’s name, expiration date of the public key, name of the CA that issued the Digital ID, serial number of the ID and the digital signature of the CA that issued the ID.

Keys are used to encrypt and decrypt data sent over a network. Instead of using the same key to encrypt and decrypt it is more secure to use a private key to encrypt and a public key to decrypt data. For example, when a message is sent from location A it is encrypted before it is sent with a private key, only the sender knows the key, for the recipient to be able to read the message it must first be decrypted. This happens with the public key, a key available to anyone to use to decrypt messages sent from the owner and encrypted with the private key. Only the public key that matches the private key used for encryption will be able to decrypt the message, this allows for greater security.

The authentication of a digital ID allows the recipient of the message to be confident of the identity of the sender as well as the integrity of the message. Without it, there is no way to be certain the message was not compromised during transmission.
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