4. SSL, TLS: from genesis to standard

4.1 Netscape: the birth of SSL

As mentioned above, e-commerce, and therefore the Web, is the key application for a transport security protocol. So it was only natural that the engineering of this protocol should be carried out by the leading Web client company of the time, Netscape Communications. The result was Secure Socket Layer (SSL), which first came to fruition in 1994 with version 1.0 (which was not deployed), followed shortly afterwards by the release of SSL 2.0. Initially included in Netscape Navigator 2, SSL was perfectly transparent to the user, with no competition, making it an immediate must-have, and other browsers quickly followed Netscape's lead by implementing its protocol. Since 1998, the OpenSSL free project has provided the community with an implementation that...