Wednesday, 31 January 2018

What's the difference between SSL, TLS, and HTTPS?

"SSL" (Transport Layer) means "Secure Sockets Layer". This was coined by the inventors of the first versions of the protocol, Netscape (the company was later bought by AOL).

"TLS" (Transport Layer) means "Transport Layer Security". The name was changed to avoid any legal issues with Netscape so that the protocol could be "open and free" (and published as a RFC). It also hints at the idea that the protocol works over any bidirectional stream of bytes, not just Internet-based sockets.


"HTTPS" = HTTP + SSL/TLS (Application Layer) is supposed to mean "HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure", which is grammatically unsound. Nobody, except the terminally bored pedant, ever uses the translation; "HTTPS" is better thought of as "HTTP with an S that means SSL"

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