SSL stands for Secure Socket Layer. It is an emerging standard developed by Netscape Communications to transfer information securely across the Internet. SSL will enable your customer's browser to connect to your web site and transparently negotiate a secure communication channel. Once this connection has been made, information, like credit card numbers, can be exchange with no chance of a third party intercepting the data.
There are some important issues regarding the use of secure processing that everyone needs to be aware of. Every web site name (i.e. www.YOUR DOMAIN.com) that wishes to use SSL will need to have an authentication certificate "signed" by Verisign. If you do not wish to get your own certificate, you can use our certificate. However, this means that you will have to use our site name (e.g. https://www.rapidsite.net/.).
Please note that SSL does not include software to process credit card transactions. Although you can securely receive credit card information through SSL, actual processing of the credit card will require a "Merchant account" from an accredited financial institution. Credit card processing software will start to appear soon and you can find more information about the new credit card processing standard called "SET" at: http://www.visa.com and http://www.mastercard.com
Setting up a Secure Form
The secure environment refers to the transmission of information from web browser to web server. If you have a link to an order form, for example, from your home page, you would need to use a URL similar to following:
The "s" in https:// suggests an SSL related file. Substitute the path to the order form starting with user directory name. If your account resides on server #2, you would need to use https://www02.rapidsite.net/<userid>/form.htm or 03, 04, etc. respectively depending on which server the secure form resides.
If the secure form calls a cgi script, you must also reference that script securely.
Note: Upgrading to a High Volume account requires a change of web server. In such instances, users will need to update their HTML to reflect the new server number.
As mentioned above, the secure environment refers to the transmission of information between web browser and web server. We suggest that you have a script written to save the submitted form content to a text file. In so doing, you can reference the text via secure URL and retrieve its content (e.g. credit card information) securely via the web thus completing the loop.
To protect the data from unauthorized web surfers, you can store the data file(s) in a password protected directory.
An alternative is to have the submitted form content sent to you via email. If your form references a custom script, you will need to reference the script securely. We have not implemented a solution for encrypting email. Users who wish to use encrypted e-mail should research PGP.