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I understand the difference between a single domain and wildcard SSL. But, as an example, what's the difference between Positive SSL and Essential SSL (2 types of SSL certs sold by Namecheap) - Essential being about 3x the price.
It's terrible, because Man-In-The-Middle attacks are trivial and automatable. namecheap.com sells PositiveSSL certs for $9/year -- that's pretty cheap and easy.
It's actually both terrible and the best security you can get.
- Terrible because today's browsers participate in a pay-for-insecurity model, where any CA certificate can be used to compromise any website on the internet (except for the tiny number of hard-coded/"pinned" certs that some browsers ship for their company's websites). Certificate Transparency only makes the problem worse [1]. Browsers currently have no way to securely verify either self-signed OR CA-signed certificates.
- It's the best security you can get because unlike certificates based on the aforementioned pay-for-insecurity "X.509 PKI" (public-key infrastructure), the security of a self-signed certificate depends on NO ONE except the issuer (i.e. _you_). Plus, they are 100% free.
I like to refer to today's X.509 PKI as "the internet's oldest backdoor" (about two decades old now [2]), because browser vendors have been aware of this problem for quite some time now and haven so far chosen to either do nothing, or make the problem worse (like with Certificate Transparency [1]).
Aaron Swartz wrote in 2011 that the solution to this problem is to use the blockchain [3]. I spoke with him about this at the time [4] and today am working on a project to bring that vision to life [5].
[1] http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/trans/current/msg00233....
[2] http://lists.randombit.net/pipermail/cryptography/2014-April...
[3] http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/squarezooko
Depends what you want, if you want trust that you can only grant yourself, then go for self signed, especially internal projects. If you want exposure of your certificates to common browsers and don't want to raise warnings in them, go for cert authorities. But remember Snowden, certificate authorities are less trustfull than you can trust yourself.
This is the right answer and it's too bad it was way down the page (I upvoted). For your situation, mark_I_watson, probably get a cert from a CA, the cheap "domain only" variety where you can verify your site to the CA simply by putting a file in the web root directory. I say this assuming the content is whatever you were already displaying to the world without encryption - therefore low-security. The cert allows you…
Another neat trick is creating your own CA, and putting your root into the local trust stores of client nodes that you care about. (Be sure to permanently airgap your root key, and create intermediate signers.)
https://www.startssl.com/ gives out free SSL certificates. Just don't expect much on their part, given it's free. For example, they refused to reissue certificates for free after Heartbleed. Also you can't use them on commercial sites. otherwise https://www.gogetssl.com/ is probably as cheap as it gets.
Not only that, but I believe they refused to revoke the certificates in the first place without payment. So if you don't pay up, even if you go buy a certificate from someone else or decide to use self-signed certificates, an attacker could still use your old certificate to MITM your website.
There are however many applications where a self-signed certificate (chain) is perfectly fine and even preferred. Think of mobile apps where you have control over how certificate validation is done on the client-side.
I'm using SSL for my personal website and it's not a commercial website.
It's terrible, because Man-In-The-Middle attacks are trivial and automatable. namecheap.com sells PositiveSSL certs for $9/year -- that's pretty cheap and easy.
Terrible compared to what? http? I don't understand why we get big scary warnings from browsers for self signed https, but never a peep out of them when submitting the same form over http.
It's terrible, because Man-In-The-Middle attacks are trivial and automatable. namecheap.com sells PositiveSSL certs for $9/year -- that's pretty cheap and easy.
> It's terrible, because Man-In-The-Middle attacks are trivial and automatable. It's actually both terrible and the best security you can get. - Terrible because today's browsers participate in a pay-for-insecurity model, where any CA certificate can be used to compromise any website on the internet (except for the tiny number of hard-coded/"pinned" certs that some browsers ship for their company's websites). Certifi…
