How SSL Can Protect Your eCommerce Transactions

25 July 2022

Are you looking for ways to help improve site visitors’ confidence in your ecommerce site? One thing to consider is having SSL protection for your ecommerce transactions. With online buyers being savvier these days, they’re focused on keeping their private data safe, especially when making a purchase with a debit or credit card. These site visitors look for SSL protection on each ecommerce site where they plan to make a purchase.

What is SSL?

SSL stands for secure socket layer, which is the name of a technology that adds security to online information exchanges and transactions of all types. The real name of this technology is TLS (Transport Security Layer). However, most people are familiar with SSL, which is most common for those who are not in security tech circles.

Have you ever noticed that when you connect to a server, the address bar of your web browser changes? Instead of the http://,” you typed into the address bar, the address changes to “https://,” and you’ll see a small image of some type. The most common image is a green padlock, which lets you know that you have an SSL (secure) connection with the specific server.

SSL is a way to send information securely to the right person, business, or organisation. It also encrypts the information while it travels from your device to the server.

SSL ensures that ecommerce shoppers can identify they’re on the correct server and that their data has been kept private through encryption.

What are Public-Key Cryptography & Symmetric Encryption?

Before you can truly understand how SSL works, you’ll need to understand the basics of two different kinds of encryption and identity verification.

We’ll start with public-key encryption. While this is a complex topic, we’ll keep it short and simple. Public-key encryption uses two different “keys,” one that’s private and one that’s public. The private key is a secret that is guarded, while the public key is just that—public.

Anyone can know this public key; however, they won’t be able to access any data with only the public key. They must also have the private key to do this. What’s more, the private key can also be used to sign information sent over the Internet. This may be used to verify the identity of a sender, for instance.

How Does SSL Ensure I’m Sending Information to the Right Place?

Cybercriminals are increasingly trying to dupe people into handing over their credentials for online accounts. This may be through an email that looks like it came from their bank. The email, called a phishing email, looks almost exactly like a real message from their bank. The email may ask the person to sign in to their account to verify information or for another reason. When the individual uses a link included in the phishing attempt, they are instead taken to the criminal’s fake website. If the individual uses their credentials to sign into the fake site, the crooks can steal the sign-in data. They can then access this person’s bank account!

SSL works to keep this from happening. It lets you know that your connection to a specific server is legitimate. Once the SSL connection has been made with the server, the server sends what’s called a digital certificate that was signed using a private key from an organisation your browser trusts. Browsers have a public key that fits with the private key used to sign the digital certificate.

Once that idea sinks in, you may begin to realise that it’s impossible for your browser to store all the public keys for every site you visit online. The reason is that there are literally millions of public keys. What’s the solution? Certificate authorities were developed to hand this. They use their private key to sign certificates of businesses you may want to buy from or work with in a more secure manner.

Consider Amazon. On their site, you can see their digital certificate has been signed by VeriSign, which is a very well-known Certificate Authority. To see this, all you need to do is click on the lock in the browser’s URL bar.

This opens a message in your browser that may say something like, “Connection is secure. Your information (for example, passwords or credit card numbers) is private when it is sent to this site.” Looking a little farther down the note, you’ll see “Certificate (Valid).”

Click on that text, and it opens up another message. Here is the certificate information that provides information about the Certificate Authority who has used their private key to verify Amazon’s site is real, and all data is encrypted. You may see a name like “Digicert Global CA G2.” That’s OK. Click over to the “Certification Path” tab on this message, and you’ll see this is really VeriSign.

This is the assurance that you’re truly connected to Amazon’s site and that all data you exchange with the site is encrypted. Doesn’t that make you feel better? This is the very reassurance your own customers deserve when visiting your ecommerce site!

How Does SSL Protect My Information When I Send It?

That’s a great question! Once your browser has verified the connection, it then creates what’s known as a pre-master key. The pre-master key is encrypted with the server’s public key from the certificate, which is then sent to the server.

From there, the server decrypts the pre-master key, and then both the browser and the server use some specific algorithms on the pre-master key, which creates a master key. The master key is then used to generate session keys. The session keys are used to symmetrically encrypt all data that goes between the browser and the server.

The true nature of the entire process is quite technical, so we’ve tried to keep this explanation as simple as possible. There are more details involved; however, the example can help you what goes on to ensure your data is kept secure.

When this type of system has been set up correctly, it can be one of the most secure possible. But what about people “listening” in on the communication? They can’t do anything without the session keys because they don’t have the private keys from the server’s organisation. And even if they were intercepting the communication, the information has been encrypted, making it almost impossible to decrypt. While it may be possible, it would take them a very long, long time to do this.

Concluding Thoughts

SSL technology is a highly reliable method of keeping private communications safe and secure between customers and their ecommerce organisations.

Implementing SSL on your own ecommerce site is the best way to reassure your own customers that you take their privacy seriously, too.

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