TLS and SSL

Transport Layer Security (TLS) and Secure Socket Layer (SSL) are protocols that provide secure communication over the Internet by encrypting the messages in transit. TLS is the more modern version of the two.

There are four phases to establishing a secure connection. They are TCP handshake, TLS handshake, key exchange, and data exchange.

During the TCP handshake, both parties establish the basic TCP connection starting with the client initiating a "TCP sync" message. The server would acknowledge with a "TCP sync + ack" message, to which the TCP connection is completed where the client acknowledges with a "TCP ack" message.

After the successful TCP handshake, the next step is to establish the TLS handshake. In this step, the client and server agree on which TLS version and cipher suite to use. The server will issue a certificate upon agreement, which includes the server's public key that the client will use to encrypt data for transmission.

The client will then generate and encrypt a sessio key using the server's public key. The server will decrypt the message using its respective private key to get the client's session key.

The session key is used by both client and server to encrypt and decrypt all subsequent data exchange. This is known as symmetric key encryption.