Community Minded Certificate Authority

Have you ever wanted an SSL certificate for your business, not-for-profit organisation or even personal web site, but didn’t want to pay exorbitant fees and sacrifice your privacy? There is a free, independent, transparent and effective alternative: www.CAcert.org.

CAcert’s main aim is to provide an open alternative to expensive security certificates. This enables thousands of smaller Web services to abandon their current home-brew PKI solutions in which users are (rightfully) wary of placing their trust.

Using CAcert you can easily:

* Protect yourself and others from being spied on as they enter information into your website

* Protect the privacy of your email, both content and headers from snooping

* Protect your passwords, accounts and servers

In 2003, CAcert, a non-profit certificate authority, quietly stepped forward with a proposal that was as simple as it was groundbreaking: the Australian born organisation would offer signed, 128-bit and greater, X.509 certificates for any organisation, from the home enthusiast to large multinational enterprises alike - for free!

Like so many open source mavericks before them, a small group of committed individuals simply took a long, hard look at the PKI industry and realized there had to be a better way, the current system wasn't protecting web sites. There is relatively only a handful of web servers protected with SSL when compared with the total numbers of websites on the internet. When things like POP3 and IMAP security are also taken into consideration, the ratio of protected sites becomes even more alarming.

In almost no time at all, CAcert began providing for no cost what established certificate authorities were routinely hawking for hundreds or even thousands of dollars per certificate per server.

Today, CAcert offers certificates for HTTPS, S/MIME, VPN, POP3S, IMAPS and other authentication/encryption schemes. Whether you’re in the market for a personal or server-side solution, you can save your money and your personal information – CAcert’s expenses are covered by donations and advertising, not exorbitant (and unnecessary) annual fees.

And that’s not all. CAcert offers an extensive “Web of Trust” (WoT) assurance scheme, which was inspired by the WoT scheme developed by Thawte, which was in turn influenced by the WoT scheme by Phil Zimmerman and the folks at PGP. The WoT program allows CAcert’s more than 6,000 members to notorise/sign/assure (depending on what terminology you prefer) one another in pursuit of identity verification.

As a user increases his or her number of trust points with CAcert, advanced features are unlocked and become available for use. One such feature allows users to submit their PGP/GPG key to be signed by the CAcert high-trust key.

To get yourself assured, simply call on the CAcert people attending this meeting or visit the website: www.CAcert.org

CAcert's Root Certificate fingerprints: A6:1B:37:5E:39:0D:9C:36:54:EE:BD:20:31:46:1F:6B and
135C EC36 F49C B8E9 3B1A B270 CD80 8846 76CE 8F33

Robert Cruikshank

2004-06-28T02:57:00