Thawte Certificate Authority Reviews

This site offers FREE email security certificates. The downside to this is that you have to answer a lot of questions in order to get the certificate, because there has to be a process of identity verification in lieu of a credit card number, etc... On the upside, though, once you go through the verification process, you can get as many email security certs as you want for FREE and without having to reverify your identity. The certificates you will receive from thawte use an encryption/decryption process involving smime.p7s which is a standard of the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) for sending signed and encrypted email, as well as ANY type of PKI (Public Key Infrastructure). Most S/MIME implementations are based around the X.509 standard for public keys since PGP uses a separate standard called OpenPGP for putting its data into email messages. The pkcs #7 in "smime.p7s" represents the data format for keys in X.509. X.509 is nice, because it can be used for ssh public keys, as well as for signatures. (As always, though, you should use a separate or subkey for encryption, since it is logically separate from authentication.) However, most users do not need a permanent SSH/SSL key. If money is not an issue, you may want to go a different route for an email security cert. Although other companies charge for their email certs, the identity verification process is less grueling than thawte's. But what the heck? IT'S FREE!