Survey of SSL certificate authorities

Posted by Matthias Gelbmann on 14 May 2012 in News, SSL Certificate Authorities

SSL certificate authorities are institutions that issue SSL certificates. SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is a protocol that allows websites to transmit information encrypted to its visitors. It is an important feature that makes e-commerce and many other online services (e.g. webmail) feasible. More and more sites use SSL also for information that was previously considered uncritical and thus not worth the computational effort of encryption. The Google search site is one example.

TSL (Transport Layer Security) is a protocol that has superseded SSL, but for this survey of certificate authorities, we consider them equivalent and we call the survey by it's more common name SSL.

We monitor authorities that are trusted by major browser. If we see a certificate that is issued by an unknown authority or by the site itself (self-signed), we show them in the survey, but we don't count them in the market share calculations.

The most popular SSL certificate authority is Symantec with 43.4% market share, although the certificates are issued by entities that were bought by Symantec: GeoTrust, Thawte, Verisign and TrustCenter. Next is Comodo with 27.8% market share, and Go Daddy with 14.2%, including the Starfield certificates.

The dominance of the Symantec Group is even greater on high traffic sites. Market share is 61.1% amongst the top 1.000 sites.

Whenever we introduce a new survey, we also generate the breakdown and segmentation reports with existing categories. That provides a large range of reports worth exploring. e.g. SSL certificate authorities used in France (Comodo is leading here). or on Google Web Servers (where Symantec has 85.4% market share).

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Please note, that all trends and figures mentioned in that article are valid at the time of writing. Our surveys are updated frequently, and these trends and figures are likely to change over time.

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