SSL PCI DSS Compliance Checker

Check if your domain meets PCI DSS TLS requirements

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Compliance Checks

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About PCI DSS Compliance Checker

Our free PCI DSS Compliance Checker verifies that your domain's TLS configuration meets PCI DSS requirements. This includes checking TLS version (1.2+), cipher strength, key size, HSTS headers, and certificate validity — all critical for processing payment card data.

How to Use

1Enter your payment processing domain
2Click "Check Compliance" to scan TLS configuration
3Review compliance status and fix any non-compliant items

Use Cases

•Annual Audits: Prepare for PCI DSS assessment by verifying TLS requirements
•Payment Gateway Integration: Ensure compliance before connecting to payment processors
•Ongoing Monitoring: Continuously verify TLS stays compliant after configuration changes

PCI DSS Requirements

•TLS 1.2 or higher must be used
•No weak ciphers (RC4, DES, 3DES, NULL, EXPORT)
•Minimum 2048-bit RSA or equivalent key strength
•HSTS header must be present
•Valid, non-expired certificate

Frequently Asked Questions

PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) is a set of security requirements for organizations that handle payment card data. Requirement 4 mandates strong cryptography and TLS 1.2 or higher for transmitting cardholder data over public networks.

PCI DSS requires TLS 1.2 or higher. TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 are no longer considered secure and do not meet PCI DSS requirements. SSL 2.0 and SSL 3.0 are completely prohibited under PCI DSS standards.

PCI DSS requires quarterly external vulnerability scans and annual assessments. However, it is best practice to check compliance monthly or whenever you make changes to your TLS configuration, deploy new servers, or renew certificates.

No, and it would be misleading to claim otherwise. This page tests the TLS transport requirements — strong ciphers, refused weak suites, encrypted connections — which are a small, checkable slice of the standard. Most of PCI DSS concerns scope, cardholder data handling, access control, segmentation and process, none of which any external scan can verify. Formal compliance is established by an assessment against the whole standard.

Requirement 4.2.1 covers strong cryptography over open public networks, and 4.2.1.1 is explicit that only strong ciphers are supported. This page tests exactly that observable behaviour: whether known-weak suites can still be negotiated. Refusing them is what matters — a server that supports them alongside strong ones still fails, because an attacker with a downgrade path can force the weak one.

Because other pages on this site cover that directly and thoroughly, and duplicating it here would add nothing. For a transport-focused compliance view, the cipher and protocol findings on this page are the ones specific to PCI's requirements. If you need the full picture for one host, run the certificate checker alongside it rather than expecting either page to stand in for the other.

Check the timing first — scans and assessments run at different moments, and a configuration change between them explains most disagreements. Then check whether the scan tested a different endpoint: a load balancer, a CDN or a regional host may have been assessed rather than the host you scanned. If both match, the disagreement is worth raising with your QSA, since the finding is on the observable transport layer.

That the server is configured too narrowly to satisfy the requirement. The fix is widening the accepted suite list to include strong ciphers rather than narrowing it further — TLS 1.3 suites plus ECDHE with AES-GCM or ChaCha20 covers modern clients without exposing anything weak. Check what your client base actually negotiates before you narrow it again.

How the Compliance Check Works

PCI DSS constrains TLS configuration in specific, testable ways. This page checks those testable requirements against a live connection and an HTTP request — and deliberately does not claim to assess anything it cannot observe.

1Connect and read what is negotiated: protocol version and cipher suite, then test whether strong suites are accepted while known-weak ones — RC4, DES, 3DES, NULL and export suites — are refused. Refusing weak suites is an explicit requirement, not a preference.
2Fetch a page over HTTPS and confirm the connection is encrypted end to end, which is requirement 4.2 rather than an inference from the handshake alone.
3Report a pass rate across the checks performed, with each finding named and severity attached so an assessor can see exactly which requirements were tested and which are outside an external probe's reach.

What this page cannot assess is most of PCI DSS: scope, cardholder data handling, segmentation, key management processes and whether change control exists. Those need an assessor and evidence, not a scan. Treat this as the transport-layer subset of a much larger obligation.

Tips & Best Practices

•Verify TLS configuration meets PCI DSS requirements
•Use PCI compliance scanning for payment card processing
•Document PCI compliance for quarterly assessment
•Monitor PCI compliance status continuously

Technical Details

Standard: PCI DSS compliance requirements for TLS
Requirements: Protocol versions, cipher suites, key management
Audit: TLS configuration PCI compliance assessment
Output: PCI DSS compliance status with remediation

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