Tag: SSL Posts

How SSL Works

Technology

It’s been a long time since I did a technology post, but I’ve recently had security on my mind and thought I would give a quick primer for SSL. For those of you who don’t know, SSL stands for secure socket layer, and is the technology on the internet that makes all eCommerce and web security possible. And here’s how it works. First, you need to understand the two different types of encryption. Symmetric Encryption Symmetric encryption is any encryption that involves one key and can be decoded in exactly the same manner that it was encoded. In fact, often decoding a message is simply the result of encoding an already encoded message, which produces the original plain text. For example, one could simply replace the letter “e” with the letter “i” in a document (and vice versa) and send it to a friend. Obviously it’s a pretty crappy form […]