How Certificates Work

SSL Certificates work to help prove that you are who you say you are in the online space.  Typically, businesses apply for a certificate to establish a trusted gateway to their customers so that when customers submit information (online orders of credit cards, personal information, etc), then they are protected from misuse. 

Much like your driver’s license is issued by the government, an SSL Certificate is issued by a trusted third-party authority whose responsibility is to validate your identity and provide you with a method to encrypt information. 

SSL Certificates bind an identity to a pair of electronic keys that can be used to encrypt and decipher digital information.  A public key encrypts the information and a private key unlocks encrypted information and helps decipher it.  This binary process makes it possible to verify someone’s claim that they have the right to use a given key, helping to prevent the misuse of keys to impersonate other users.