The Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) is a commonly-used protocol for managing the security of a message transmission on the Internet. TLS(Transport Layer Security ) and SSL encrypt the segments of network connections above the Transport Layer, using asymmetric cryptography for privacy and a keyed message authentication code for message reliability.

Each SSL Certificate consists of a public key and a private key to encrypt data ? a public key known to everyone and a private or secret key known only to the recipient of the message. The public key is used to encrypt information and the private key is used to decipher it.  Many Web sites use the protocol to obtain confidential user information, such as credit card numbers. By convention, URLs that require an SSL connection start with https: instead of http

SSL Certificates are credentials for the online world, uniquely issued to a specific domain and Web server and authenticated by the SSL Certificate provider.

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