What is
the "Secure Process"?
Secure transactions protect your sensitive
information from being intercepted by encrypting the data. This means that the individual
letters and numbers are scrambled by running them through an "algorithm" or a
list of instructions. A algorithm can be as simple as "shift each character by
1". This would take the letters and numbers in the data and change a's into b's, b's
into c's, 2's into 3's and so on. |
This message:
Hi Bob then becomes:
Ij Cpc |
Our servers use Veri-sign certificates that
include extremely complicated algorithms consisting of hundreds of instructions. When you
request a page with a URL or link that starts with: https:// rather than http:// ,
you are telling your browser that you want an encrypted page. Your browser then
asks our server for the certificate or list of instructions that it will use to un-encrypt
the page. You will not actually see the certificate, the browser will place it in a
special folder behind the scenes. Then the browser asks for the actual page. As the
information leaves the server, it passes through the list of encryption instructions
included in the certificate and is unintelligible to anyone who sees it as it crosses the
Internet. As the information comes into the browser, it passes through the list of
instructions in the browser's copy of the certificate (only in reverse) and displays the
result in the browser window. |
So the encrypted
info: Ij Cpc becomes: Hi Bob
|
If the page includes a form, the information you
type into the form (like credit card numbers) is sent through the list of encryption
instructions in the certificate when you hit the submit button and is sent back to the
server. The server then decrypts it and and passes it to a program (commonly called a
Common Gateway Interface or cgi). The CGI can email the info to you or place it in a text
file or even pass it to a database. The pre-configured CGI programs we supply, webform.cgi
and cgiemail, send the info by email to you. Follow either of these links for complete
instructions on their use: |
cgiemail
webform.cgi |
|