Secure Shopping

GoDaddy.com SSL certificates support both industry-standard 128-bit (used by all banking infrastructures to safeguard sensitive data) and high-grade 256-bit SSL encryption to secure online transactions. The actual encryption strength on a secure connection using a digital certificate is determined by the level of encryption supported by the user's browser and the server that the Web site resides on.

For example, the combination of a Firefox® browser and an Apache 2.X Web server enables up to 256-bit AES encryption with GoDaddy.com certificates.

Encryption strength is measured in key length-number of bits in the key. To decipher an SSL communication, one needs to generate the correct decoding key. Mathematically speaking, 2n possible values exist for an n-bit key. Thus, 40-bit encryption involves 240 possible values. 128- and 256-bit keys involve a staggering 2128 and 2256 possible combinations, respectively, rendering the encrypted data de facto impervious to intrusion.

Even with a brute-force attack (the process of systematically trying all possible combinations until the right one is found) cracking a 128- or 256-bit encryption is computationally unfeasible.