- Understand exactly what the SSL certificate warranty means before considering it as a core product feature
What is an SSL Certificate warranty?
The warranty level is the financial protection awarded to your customers against the CA misissuing an SSL Certificate. If a customer relies on the information within a misissued SSL Certificate and suffers financial loss as a direct result of relying on the certificate, the CA will hold insurance to cover claims made by the customer against the CA.
Effectively, the warranty is the insurance taken out by the CA to protect itself in the event it makes a mistake.
Verisign offers a more advanced insurance policy in that it will also provide insurance against a compromise of your private key or loss of certificate - but such insurance comes at a price.
How likely is a missisuance?
It is highly unlikely that a WebTrust compliant CA will mississue a certificate. All WebTrust compliant CAs have passed certification to ensure that procedures and policies are in place that make mississuance improbable. For this reason, many WebTrust compliant CAs do not offer a warranty at all.
CAs that are not WebTrust compliant will often offer the warranty as a means of adding perceived value to their SSL certificates.
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