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up vote 5 down vote favorite

Can anyone point me to a free SSL Certificate authority I can trust?

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8  
How can I tell you who you can trust? Do you trust me that much, that you're willing to trust whoever I trust? – David Thornley Aug 19 '10 at 17:55
possible duplicate of Free (or nearly free) Trusted SSL Certificate? – RobM Dec 16 '10 at 17:41
Can you clarify what you mean? What trust are you planning to extend to them? – David Schwartz Aug 28 '11 at 6:42

migrated from stackoverflow.com Aug 19 '10 at 23:22

4 Answers

up vote 7 down vote accepted

Doesn't the designation Certificate Authority imply they are trusted ;)

You should check out http://cert.startcom.org/. It does not appear to be a bait and switch "free" certificate, but a legitimately free certificate.

EDIT: Note that StartCom is based out of Israel.

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2  
Yes and it looks like it is on the the mozilla list: mozilla.org/projects/security/certs/included – Codeape Aug 19 '10 at 17:46
Also Internet Explorer - download.microsoft.com/download/1/4/f/… – Mike S Aug 19 '10 at 17:58
1 year for free =) I think I will go for this one. Thanks =) – Codeape Aug 19 '10 at 18:06
"Certificate Authority" doesn't imply that it's trusted. Anyone can create their own CA, but it's up to the parties that may use it to choose whether or not they trust it. (The question was indeed certainly about CAs trusted by default by most browsers.) – Bruno Aug 25 '10 at 13:52
2  
what's wrong with it being based out of Israel? They are a real company, very serious about their certificates (when I signed up for one they called the number I provided and interviewed me for half an hour) – dyasny May 11 '12 at 8:35
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up vote 4 down vote

StartCom and CACert are really your only two options for completely free CA certificates. You could also become your own CA or use a trial certificate from another provider: http://www.sslshopper.com/article-free-ssl-certificates-from-a-free-certificate-authority.html

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up vote 3 down vote

http://www.startssl.com/ is free for basic certificates and trusted by all major browsers.

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StartCom/StartSSL doesn't support subdomains. – Dan Dascalescu Nov 26 '12 at 22:11
up vote 1 down vote

CAcert.org has my vote.

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Unfortunately their root certificates are currently not shipped with many operating systems or web browser (see wiki.cacert.org/InclusionStatus), so the users would need to manually import these first (cacert.org/index.php?id=3). – joschi Aug 21 '10 at 5:52
Agreed - however if you're running a SMB and need to set up a variety of SSL sites just for your internal ~50 people (IMAPS, Exchange OWA/SSL, etc.) it's a great solution. A little more work is involved but the value is worth it... – troyengel Aug 21 '10 at 14:22
But in this case (known people in a private network) wouldn't be even simpler to create your own certificate? – ring0 Aug 26 '10 at 2:03
not particularly - since you have to get your users to import a CA root into their Firefox/Thunderbird/IE/OSX Keychain anyways using CAcert becomes a lot more enticing; you get to manage the certs through their UI and the ongoing tasks of SSL issuing/revoking is handy. When you have 10 or 20 internal certs, this matters. – troyengel Aug 28 '10 at 14:43

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