Protocol description

Because of this tandem with TCP, and in contrast to a security protocol at network level or below, TLS must integrate the particularities of a transport session.

Thus, TLS assumes that the transport channel is capable of delivering messages and maintaining sessions: for this reason, TLS can only be used over TCP. Secondly, TLS is application-dependent, meaning that it is up to the application to implement the TLS service during communication. This also implies that a TLS connection is dedicated to a single application and is destroyed as soon as the application session (and therefore the underlying TCP connection) is terminated. As a result of this highly dynamic and – if you will – somewhat "messy" session management, the management channel is conveniently integrated into the user channel and not handled by an additional protocol, known as in-flow management. As...