The application of 3rd party certification programme in Malaysia

When conducting e-commerce transactions, do you have sufficient confidence on the security? Can you sure that the web page is the official web page? Therefore, there is a practices called certification programme. This is performed by the third party in order to verify and authenticate the web site.

The “third parties” who issue the digital certificate to verify and authenticate the website is called certificate authorities. Digital certificate actually can be considered as an electronic “credit card” that establishes the credentials when conducting business or performing transactions on the Web and normally it contains the holder’s name, validity period, public key information and a signed hash of the certificate data. There are some famous certificate authorities (CA) such as VeriSign and MSC Trustgate in Malaysia which is established in 1999.

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VeriSign- www.verisign.com



MSC Trustgate- www.msctrustgate.com



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Normally, the certificate requestor’s computer generates the public and private keys. After that, the company keeps its private key in its local system and sends the public key to the CA just above mentioned. Then, the CA will verify the company’s identity and make sure that the requested certificate is valid for the given requestor. If it is permitted, the CA signs the public key and binds it to a certificate. Lastly, the CA will issues and manages the certificate until its expiration or in the situation of revocation.

Basically, the application of third party certification programme is able to enhance the reliability of the e-commerce site and therefore improve the customer trust.

Notes: In my opinion, we need to confirm that we are performing the transactions in the “real” website when we are conducting the e-commerce transactions, one of the method is we can check the website have the certificate icon or not, or the website have been verified by those CAs or not.