Introduction

Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS) provide a secure protocol by which two networked peers may perform encrypted communications. SSL is most commonly used for sending private data from a web browser to a web server. This private data may include credit card numbers or other personal information. Virtually everyone who has browsed the web has at some point used SSL but may not have realized it. When browsing the Internet, if the browser states that it is entering a secure site, then SSL is being used to authenticate the web server and to encrypt the data exchanged.

Netscape created SSL 1.0 in 1994. However, version 1.0 was never shipped. The first working version of SSL was 2.0. This was packaged in Netscape Navigator in late 1994. Netscape continued to work on SSL with the help of outside engineers. A year later, SSL 3.0 was released. In 1996, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) took over responsibility for the protocol from Netscape. The IETF chose to rename the protocol to TLS (Transport Layer Security) perhaps thinking a name not linked to Netscape would be more acceptable. This...