Authentication in SSL is made by digital certificates. Digital Certificates are comparable to "electronic passports or electronic business licences". Merchants need to hold a certificate in order to show that they able to transfer under the SSL protocol. These certificates are obtained by a "Certification Authority (CA)" such as VeriSign Australia. There is a concern for merchants in relation to customer's authentication.
SSL is readily available to nearly any customer who is on the internet. The reason it is so accessible is because it is integrated into most of the internet browsers, including Netscape and Internet Explorer. Therefore nearly every customer has the requirements to perform a SSL transaction. The merchants only need to enable SSL on their web server and get a digital certificate so they can run the secured transactions.
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The SSL protocol supports the use of a variety of different cryptographic algorithms, or ciphers, .
for use in operations such as authenticating the server and client to each other, transmitting certificates, and establishing session keys. Clients and servers may support different cipher suites, or sets of ciphers, depending on factors such as the version of SSL they support, company policies regarding acceptable encryption strength, and government restrictions on export of SSL-enabled software. Among its other functions, the SSL handshake protocol determines how the server and client negotiate which cipher suites they will use to authenticate each other, to transmit certificates, and to establish session keys. .
The cipher suite descriptions that follow refer to these algorithms: .
• DES. Data Encryption Standard, an encryption algorithm used by the U.S. Government. .
• DSA. Digital Signature Algorithm, part of the digital authentication standard used by the U.S. Government. .
• KEA. Key Exchange Algorithm, an algorithm used for key exchange by the U.