What is SSL Secure Socket Layer

SSL is short for Secure Socket Layer which is a transport layer protocol that is used in a secure internet connection. If you want a communication connection via the internet with a secure technique, then use an SSL connection.

SSL offers three levels of security, namely:

• Authentication: Ensures that the message received is from someone who is explicit
• Confidentiality: Protects messages from a reading effort by recipients who are not eligible throughout their journey.
• Integrity: Ensuring that the original message, does not feel a change in its journey.

The first two you can get from your ISP, contact your ISP to convince him.

SSL operates between the Application and Transport layers in the OSI model. SSL does not work transparently automatically, because only if the application protocols are explicitly implemented.

SSL uses public-key encryption for the purpose of authentication and symmetric key encryption to encrypt the information sent. For public SSL encryption keys, use the Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA) encryption algorithm, so it depends on the implementation of the supported infrastructure public key (PKI). Message integrity is ensured by an integrity checking mechanism technique called a message authentication code (MAC).

Authentication process

An SSL session starts when an SSL-enabled client requests a connection with a server with SSL-enabled over TCP port 443, the SSL port. This will initiate an SSL connection between the client and server. All sites that use SSL have a URL with the HTTPS prefix. The server then sends the digital certificate and public key to the client.

The client server then negotiates which level of encryption can be received which is often 40-bit, 56-bit, or 128-bit and above. The client then generates a secret session key which is then encrypted using the public key from the server to send it to the server. The server then decodes the secret session key using the private key. From this point onwards, the secret key cryptography is imposed and then the session key is used to encrypt all data exchanges between the client and the server, leaving a secure private communication.

SSL is certainly not free from problems. All web transactions with SSL will increase processing overhead on the server. Sometimes it is double the process overhead compared to using a secure SSL connection. With the same machine hardware, the processing load level using SSL will be the heaviest compared to without SSL.

Besides that, SSL is difficult to implement in e-commuters that use web server farms and server load balancers. This view of SSL is designed so that the client uses the same IP address around the session.

To overcome this problem, often used exclusive hardware called SSL Accelerators to collect processing fees and cache sessions for different servers to increase performance.