SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is a cryptographic protocol that uses asymmetric cryptography for traffic key authentication, symmetric encryption for preservation of confidentiality and authentication codes for message integrity check.
The SSL protocol is a secure channel with the following properties:
- The encryption is used for all the messages after a simple dialog of determining the provate key.
- The server side of the dialog is always encoded, the client side does it optionally.
- The exchange of messages provides the integrity check.
The advantage of the SSL is its independence from an application protocol (HTTP, FTP, etc.) working transparently over the SSL. Thus, the SSL can validate the encryption algorithm and session key before sending the first message.
