SSL certificates part of huge ‘confidence’ game

It started innocently enough.

In the mid 1990s some kind of encryption was needed in order to protect information, such as financial data, as it traveled across the Internet between a user’s Web browser and a firm’s Web server. The solution was close at hand; public-key encryption.

Here’s the basic concept. If you have something you want to send me, I give you a “public key.” You “lock” the information using the public key, then send it to me. Now, here’s where the system gets really clever; the public key you used to lock the information can’t be used to…