If you've used the Web for any amount of time, you must have heard a lot about online security. In fact, shopping online (or banking, healthcare, and more) would not exist if there wasn't a way of securing information sent over the Internet.

Without getting into a deep lesson on how security works, we do want to give you a primer on the various terms and concepts that will help you understand how security works with your Magento store.

When your customers come to your store and wish to submit confidential information, such as in credit card payment, your server needs to allow this information to be sent from your customer's computer to your server (and on to the payment processor in this case) in a manner that will prevent anyone outside of your system from intercepting and reading this information.

On the web, the most common and convenient method is through SSL encryption. Secure Socket Layer (SSL) means that any information sent between two points on the Internet—such...