In-depth Understanding of SSL and Its Working Principle

Tony
7 min readNov 4, 2024

SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer, a security protocol. SSL and its successor, Transport Layer Security (TLS), are security protocols designed to provide security and data integrity for network communications. TLS and SSL encrypt network connections between the transport layer and the application layer.

SSL to TLS Timeline

  • SSL is a security protocol developed by Netscape in the 1990s to encrypt and protect communication over the Internet. Due to security issues, SSL v1.0 was never released.
  • In 1995, Netscape released SSL v2.0, but it still had many flaws. The release of SSL v3.0 in 1996 addressed these issues in SSL v2.0, introducing significant improvements that fundamentally changed the way the Internet worked. However, since 2015, SSL 3.0 and earlier versions have been deprecated.
  • TLS, developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) as an improvement to SSL, was released as TLS v1.0 in 1999. It was based on SSL v3.0 and included minor security enhancements, but these were important enough that SSL v3.0 and TLS v1.0 were not interoperable.
  • TLS v1.1 was introduced seven years later in 2006, but it was soon replaced by TLS v1.2 in 2008. This hindered the adoption of TLS v1.1, as many websites directly upgraded from TLS v1.0 to…

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Tony
Tony

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