How SSL Works Explained
Secure Socket Layer (SSL) is a secure transfer protocol used for communication on the Internet using cryptographic methods. SSL was first developed by Netscape to make its own products secure. After its public release, it was quickly adopted by a number of big players in the IT industry, including Microsoft, and it became the de-facto standard for Internet traffic encryption. So here in this article we will discuss about what is secure socket layer and how ssl works.
The main purpose of the SSL protocol is to guarantee that no one can eavesdrop on or tamper with the communication between a browser and the server where the web application is deployed. When accessing the web sites secured by SSL, a user can be sure that no one can intercept and read the information passed to the remote server; for example, usernames and passwords or credit card information when using e-commerce web sites. In addition, the user is safe to send and receive any sensitive information to and from web server, knowing that no one could have tampered with the information during transport, or can change the transported content in any way.
Another purpose of secure communication is the ability to authenticate the server and its owner based on the SSL information – so that a user can be certain that the server that it’s accessing is the one that it’s saying it is. This has become very important in today’s Internet-dependent society, so that we are sure that we are accessing our bank’s web site, for example, and not some malicious web site representing itself as our bank. The term for a site that is masquerading itself as another, tricking a user to pass sensitive information to it, is phishing.
How SSL works
SSL is a cryptographic protocol, using symmetric pair of keys to encrypt and decrypt traffic sent over the Internet. In a common SSL scenario, when the user accesses the web server for the first time, the server sends its SSL certificate, or public key, to the client. The SSL certificate contains the information about the server, its owner, company, and its validity period. A user can reject a certificate if it does not trust its authenticity, effectively terminating the connection.
If the user accepts the certificate, the certificate itself is stored in the browser, and is used to initiate a secure connection with the issuing server. This key is public, as the server sends it to anyone that asks for it. The information encoded using the public key can only be decoded using the symmetric private key. The private key is, as its name suggests, private, and kept safely on the server. A client generates the symmetric key, with which both client and server will encrypt all traffic sent to the other side. With the symmetric key, content is encoded and decoded using the same key known to both parties in the communication, which is less secure than the asymmetric public/private key communication. That’s why it’s important that the exchange of the symmetric keys is secure. Therefore, a client encodes the symmetric key using the server’s public key (received in the certificate), and the server encodes it using its private key.
When a server receives the symmetric key, the connection between server and client is secure, and all traffic sent from the browser to the web application, and response content from the web server to the browser, will be encrypted using the generated symmetric key known to client and server only. The exchanged symmetric key is valid only for the duration of the current session, and needs to be regenerated every time a user initiates a new session. The security of SSL depends on how secure the key used to encrypt data is. SSL is not unbreakable in theory, but with the amount of time required to break standard 128-bit key, in practice it is often assumed as safe from brute-force attacks. For the industry-standard 128-bit key, there are 2128 combinations possible to generate the key. The value of 2128 calculates to 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456, or roughly 240 trillion trillion trillions! To put things into perspective, today’s super computers can break the DES encryption algorithm, which uses 56-bit long keys, in around one day. If, in the future, man develops a machine that can perform the same task of breaking a 56-bit key in one second, it would still take 149.7 trillion years to brute force a 128-bit key!
SSL protocol communication over HTTP protocol is referred to as HTTPS (secure HTTP). The web sites that are using SSL encrypted connections display https as the protocol name in the browser’s address bar, for example https://www.google.com. Ensuring that the connection is secure from eavesdropping and tampering, using asymmetric and symmetric cryptography methods is the main purpose of using SSL. However, there is another useful purpose of SSL-certificate protected web sites: the ability to authenticate that the site is what it says it is.
SSL certificates, sent by the secure server as public keys to the client, contain basic information about the site to which they belong, such as the domain name, owner name, and company name. Organizations called Certificate Authorities (CA) can authenticate the details of the SSL certificate, so if the user trusts the CA, they can be sure that the secure web site is certified, and its details are correct. There is a number of CAs that can issue a certified SSL certificate. Modern browsers automatically recognize the largest and best-known CAs, and allow connections to the sites providing SSL certificates certified by these organizations automatically.
The secure icon and the registered domain name are displayed in the browser’s address bar if the SSL connection is active.
If the SSL certificate is not certified by a CA, or is certified by the CA but not recognized by the user’s browser, the user will be presented with a warning screen, where he or she can decide whether to trust the certificate.
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