StartSSL.com offers free yearly simple SSL certificates, and are supported by all major browsers. If you want higher-grade, you'll have to pay.
They're very open about wanting to provide free simple certificates for everyone.
What's the difference between a simple certificate and something higher-grade? What does the simple certificate lack that a higher grade certificate provides?
Exactly! In fact the change to green out of the ordinary lack of it might make them think something is WRONG, not better.
These are users who also keep their browser sessions going forever and therefore session cookies never expire - thereby making what was supposed to make something more secure, exactly the opposite.
The free one also wont work with wildcard certs, and will only accept one hostname in the subjectAltName field. My domain is "grepular.com", the certificate needs to contain "secure.grepular.com" for historical reasons. This means, when I use startssl, I can't include "www.grepular.com" in the cert. Unless I pay for a cert.
StartSSL is completely fine for those goals. Pretty much the only effect of an EV certificate is the green bar. (Which is easily worth $150/yr if you're doing millions in e-commerce, of course!)
jorangreef said "RE StartSSL..." then pointed to an article about the problems of SSL w.r.t mobile apps. Since this is in reply to a very positive post about StartSSL, the obvious inference is that his linked article provides some evidence on why one wouldn't want to use StartSSL. But that's pure FUD because the only mention of StartSSL in the whole article is that they close their connections so two more TCP connections are required to authenticate the cert... but anyone worth their salt would be bundling in the CA cert anyway, obviating the need for those connections.
I don't know what your beef is with 'disingenuous,' but that's exactly what I meant.
OCSP isn't an optional step involved only if you don't present your CA's intermediary certificate, it's in addition to it. The whole point of it is "I have this guy with these legit looking credentials you issued, do you still stand by them?".
You can't work around that with chaining, it can only be disabled from client code, or by having the CA issue a cert that doesn't include an OCSP address (doubt any do this now, given the number of legit certs issued to attackers in the past 2 years).
Some of those numbers don't look correct at all. For example I can't find any host name that takes longer than ~500ms to do DNS resolution over 3G. (That's almost worst case scenario, where everything except the TLD is uncached.)
