How Does Secure Socket Layer (SSL or TLS) Work?
Thursday, March 12th, 2009
The Secure Socket Layer, SSL for short, is a protocol by which many services that communicate over the Internet can do so in a secure fashion. Before we discuss how SSL works and what kinds of security it provides, let us first see what happens without SSL.
Life on the Internet without SSL
Let us make an analogy between communications between computers on the Internet and communications between people over the telephone. Without SSL, your computer-to-computer communications suffer from the same security problems from which your telephone communications suffer:
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