SSL Certificates.

Why do I get a certificate warning when browsing the vehentis secure site

Secure websites that use SSL have a certificate which shows you who operates the site. As these certificates get generated by the person running the website they could have wrong or misleading information so they are signed by a certificate authority (CA). Your web browser gets distributed with a selection of CA certificates so that this signature can be verified and the site you are connecting to checked in turn.

We use a certificate authority called CAcert to sign our website certificate. This is a CA that validates that the site is legitimate by contacting an administrative address at the domain the site will be under. The problem is that the CA Certificate is not in most browsers by default.

Is accessing the vehentis site secure

As we do use strong encryption and have our certificate signed by a well known CA we believe that people can safely access our secure site. The checking done by CACert is just as stringent as many of the CA's that have their CA Certificate distributed in your web browser.

How do I find more out about CACert

The CACert website is http://www.cacert.org/ where you can view information and also import the root certificate into your browser.

What to do about the warning?

• You can simply to ignore the warning. This is not ideal as you will get it the first time you visit our site per session. If something does change (such as someone impersonates our web site) you would get the same warning and ignore it.
• You can tell the browser to accept our site certificate permanently. This means that you get no more warnings. However, when we renew our certificate you will get the warning again.
• You can load the CAcert root certificate in to your browser. See here for details on how to install it. If you do this then our site will no longer get a warning, and neither will any others that use CAcert. This is obviously what we would recommend.

Still not sure about SSL or accessing the vehentis site

Please feel free to talk to us about our secure site or anything else you have questions - you can find our contact details on the contact us page.