You can pay a CA to issue an SSL certificate for your website costing less than 100$ per year or you can create your own SSL certificate for free.
This self-signed certificate is issued by and to the same entity. This can be achieved by OpenSSL, JAVA’s keytool, and Adobe Reader.
A paid-for SSL certificate says — “Trust me when Godaddy says I am who I say I am”. while a self-signed certificate says — “Trust me when I say I am who I am”.
A commercial SSL CA is already known to the browser.
A self-signed certificate website looks like this to the user.
But does this mean that self-signed certificates are not secure? THIS IS NOT TRUE.
The green padlock indicates 2 things:
- The identity of this website is certified.
- The traffic between your browser and the website is encrypted.
This doesn’t imply that your computer is hackproof.
The truth is both types of certificates are “equally secure”. The limitation of a self-signed certificate is that it is only feasible for limited users.