: Are free SSL certificates secure? How is it that some SSL certificates are free? What does that mean? Are they secure or not?

@Cooney921

Even major certificate authorities like verisign,globalsign,COMODO give a free trail period version of SSL certificate because they give us the chance for trusting and valuing their product.

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@Looi9037786

Have a look at Wikipedia for a good comparison of SSL services. It looks like startcom has a free SSL cert service which is recognized by IE, FF and Safari.

I suspect there are other similar services around. The main issue is to find providers which are supported by modern browsers. Having a browser warn the user that the certificate is not reliable is worse than not having a certificate at all, from the POV of conversion & sales.

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@Samaraweera270

Public Key Infrastructure depends on a Trusted Third Party that will verify and then can endorse your identitiy.

When you pay a major certificate authority like Verisign for a certificate, you are paying for their reputation as a reputable and trusted third party that can endorse the validity of your identity and your certificate. From a practical standpoint, that means that major browsers come pre-configured to trust certificates signed by those authorities.

I can create a certificate for you for free, but it will be relatively worthless, because nobody knows who I am and so my endorsement doesn't give them any confidence.

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@Sarah324

The only reason why companies charge for SSL certificates is they put time and effort into creating the certificate and expect to be paid for their work (at a profit of course). But they don't have to charge if they don't want to just like any free provider of services can do. What matters with SSL certificates is whether the major browser makers recognize the certificate issuers as trustworthy or not. If they do the browser will display the site as secure just like it would from any other recognized provider. If they don't then any user attempting to access a web page secured by the unrecognized certificate will see a warning letting them know that the certificate is not recognized and warn them not to proceed.

So the real question is, "which free provides are recognized by the major browser makers as being authoritative"?

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