SSL

Normally it is pronounced as individual letters and is short for the complete terms i.e. “Secure Sockets Layer” which is a protocol evolved by Netscape with a view to transmitting the private documents through the Internet. The SSL adopts a cryptographic technique which uses two keys to encrypt the data. The public key is known to everyone whereas the private key is only known to the recipient.

SSL is supported by Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer and mostly websites use this protocol while obtaining confidential user information. Particularly, the URLs requiring the SSL connection starts with https.

There is another protocol namely HTTP (S-HTTP) which is used for transmitting data securely over the World Wide Web.  The SSL forms a secure connection between the client and the server wherein any volume of data can be transmitted securely. S-HTTP is introduced to transmit individual messages securely. SSL and S-HTTP can also be seen as complementary instead of competing technologies. Both of the protocols have also been approved by IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force.