Wow, thanks for all that! This is only one site, somehow the sales guy knew when our certificate was going to expire.
We were planning on going with godaddy, I asked them about this, and their response was:
All of our SSL certificates support both industry-standard 128-bit and high-grade 256-bit encryption.
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 Web server normally enables up to 256-bit AES encryption with our SSL certificates. This means that depending on the Web browser and Web server that combine to establish the secure connection through one of our SSL certificates, the encryption strength of the secure connection may be 40, 56, 128, or 256 bit.
The CR Vs typVc0lly 0 1024 bit m>dulus that is generated by the server that is requesting a Secure Certificate. It must be 1024 bit length or higher, as our system will not accept anything less - the maximum bit length is 2048.
What does that mean, can you say? :)
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by: ParanormasticPosted on 2009-03-05 at 07:03:07ID: 23806155
A little bit of both. Most of the 1024 bit commercial roots have been out there long enough that they should be getting retired soon. 2048 is one of the two main standards for roots - newer ones are likely to be either 4096 or using one of the eliptic curve cryptography (ECC) standards. That being said - 1024 is still valid.
One reason to do so would be that in order to get a 2048 SSL cert for your server you would need all the CA's in the issuing chain to be of at least the same strength, or higher. Since most places only offer 3 year, a few up to 5 years, for validity 1024 is still considered acceptable for that time period.
The greater concern from the last few months would be in response to an announcement of a specific way to take advantage of an old MD5 vulnerability. The general concept has been known for about 4-5 years now, so most commercial CA's no longer use MD5 in their issuance process. Where the vulnerability is comes from places that use automated certificate issuance (instead of using a web page to submit info for a person to review - which is why it normally takes a few minutes/few hours to get a cert from most places). in addition, they would need to use sequential serial numbers, which is not normally standard practice but can be configured in most products to save database size (nCipher recommended doing this to us once, which would explain why some places might do this - not sure if they still recommend it now).
Anyways, what that all boils down to is if the root and issuing CA are using MD5 for the signing algorithm (e.g. MD5withRSA), use sequential serial numbers, and they use automated processing then their PKI is at risk for being attacked. If all 3 are not true then they are all fine if they are webtrust certified.
Honestly - most places are using 2048 or better these days - even if your existing cert was issued under a 1024 root 2 or 3 years ago, you might check up with them to see if they may have a newer root they are using now.
My recommendations are:
cheapest: godaddy
most compatible/most expensive: verisign
best price for general compatibility: comodo
If you ahve a sales person contacting you directly I'm curious as to how many certs you buy in a year - I would not expect random calls looking for a cert or two... If you issue a couple dozen certs or more per year, I would suggest contacting actual sales people fromvarious companies and see if they offer bulk discounts and if so how much based on your issuing needs. We get a great price from Comodo this way, but we issue a very large number of certs through them - I'm not sure what they would offer a medium/large company as we would be in the 'very large' category..