The situation is additionally confused by the fact that the version numbers do not give a good clue to how different the protocols were. Specifically:
SSLv2 was the first widely deployed version of SSL, but as this post indicates, had a number of issues.
SSLv3 is a more or less completely new protocol
TLS 1.0 is much like SSLv3 but with some small revisions made during the IETF standardization process.
TLS 1.1 is a really minor revision to TLS 1.0 to address some issues with the way block ciphers were used.
TLS 1.2 is a moderately sized revision to TLS 1.1 to adjust to advances in cryptography, specifically adding support for newer hashes in response to weaknesses in MD5 and SHA-1 and adding support for AEAD cipher suites such as AES-GCM.
TLS 1.3 is mostly a new protocol though it reuses some pieces of TLS 1.2 and before.
Each of these protocols has been designed so that you could automatically negotiate versions, thus allowing for clients and servers to independently upgrade without loss of connectivity.
> Each of these protocols has been designed so that you could automatically negotiate versions, thus allowing for clients and servers to independently upgrade without loss of connectivity.
The downgrade attacks on TLS are only really present in the case of client behaviour where, on failing to achieve one version, they retry a new connection without it.
This was necessary to bypass various broken server side implementations, and broken middleboxes, but wasn’t necessarily a flaw in TLS itself.
But from the learnings of this issue preventing 1.2 deployment, TLS 1.3 goes out of its way to look very similar on the wire to 1.2
Moreover, there's not really much in the way of choices here. If you don't have this kind of automatic version negotiation then it's essentially impossible to deploy a new version.
You could deploy a new version, you'd just have older clients unable to connect to servers implementing the newer versions.
It wouldn't have been insane to rename https to httpt or something after TLS 1.2 and screw backwards compatibility (yes I realize the 's' stands for secure, not 'ssl', but httpt would have still worked as "HTTP with TLS")
If a protocol is widely used wrongly, I consider it a flaw in the protocol. But overall, SSL standardization has gone decently well. I always bring it up as a good example to contrast with XMPP as a bad example.
Well, my only real point is that it’s not the version negotiation in TLS that’s broken. It’s the workaround for intolerance of newer versions that had downgrade attacks.
Fortunately that’s all behind us now, and transitioning from 1.2 to 1.3 is going much smoother than 1.0 to 1.2 went.
Considering that Microsoft was a completely different beast in that time, I'm not surprised it does not seem that silly.
M$ (appropriate name for that time) of the day was doing its best to own everything and the did not let up on trying to hold back the open source internet technologies until the early 2010's I believe. Its my opinion that they were successful in killing Java Applets, which were never able to improve past the first versions and JavaScript and CSS in general was held back many years.
I still recall my corporate overloards trying to push me to support IE's latest 'technologies' but I resisted and instead started supporting Mozilla 3.0 as soon as they fixed some core JS bugs for our custom built enterprise JavaScript SPA tools in the early 2000's. It turned out to be a great decision as the fortune 500 company started using Mozilla / Firefox in other internal apps in later years long before it became common place.
I don't think it was Microsoft that killed Java applets. I mean, for one thing, they always worked in IE, which was really the only avenue through which MS could have affected them.
No, Java applets failed because they became the poster child for "Java is slow" take. Even though it wasn't exactly true in general, it was certainly true of applets, what with waiting for them to download and then waiting for the JVM to spin up.
What killed them was 1) HTML/JS itself getting better at dynamic stuff that previously required something like applets, and 2) Flash taking over the remaining niche for which HTML wasn't good enough.
Applets died because of many reasons, like absurd startup time for the JRE (often just for silly animations), absurd memory requirements (for the time) and associated crashes, weird compatibility issues in the initial releases of the Java platform, a silly security model based on the assumption that only good actors will be able to get a CA certificate in order to do whatever they want in your PC, an immature sandboxing technology in browsers (not only IE), etc.
Oh wow, I just discovered that my brain unconsciously had a hard time to differentiate between SSL and TLS. And now, after two friggin decades I find out, why!
Back closer to the time, there were some people around who insisted that SSL specifically meant the old versions and it was all TLS now. I recall a couple of occasions where people were talking about UCSPI-SSL and someone stepped in to explain that We Don't Do SSL Now. As the headlined article says, that contrived distinction seems silly with the hindsight of decades.
The nomenclature was complicated in people's minds by SMTP. Because there was SMTP over a largely transparent encrypted connection, and SMTP where it started unencrypted and negotiated a switch, as well as plain old cleartext. It didn't help that RFC 2487 explained that STARTTLS negotiated "TLS more commonly known as SSL". RFC 8314 explains some of the historical mess that SMTP got into with two types of SMTP (relay and submission) and three types of transport.
And the "S" for "submission" could be confused with the "S"s in both "SSL" and "TLS". It's not just TLAs that are ambiguous, indeed. There was confusion over "SMTPS" and "SSMTP", not helped at all by the people who named programs things like "sSMTP".
I'm still calling it SSL in 2025. (-: And so is Erwin Hoffmann.
- "SSL" is a set of protocols so ridiculously old, busted and insecure that nobody should ever use them. It's like talking about Sanskrit; ancient and dead.
- "TLS" is way better than "SSL", but still there are insecure versions. Any version before 1.2 is no longer supported due to security holes.
- Technically an "ssl certificate" is neither "SSL" nor "TLS", it's really an "X.509 Certificate with Extended Key Usage: Server Authentication". But that doesn't roll off the tongue. You could use a cert from 1996 in a modern TLS server; the problem would be its expiration date, and the hash/signature functions used back then are deprecated. (some servers still support insecure methods to support older clients, which is bad)
The point is more that SSL 3.0 and TLS 1.0 were nearly identical. That is, the breaks in similarity were at SSL 2.0 -> SSL 3.0 (and TLS 1.2 -> TLS 1.3, to a lesser extent), as opposed to the common misconception that TLS 1.0 is what changed everything.
But yes, it's all a bit irrelevant now that anything below TLS 1.2 is sketchy to use.
Right, but they accomplish the same thing and people move monotonically from SSL to TLS. It’s not like choosing between React and Angular, but like choosing between React version 5 and React version 10 for a new project. SSL and TLS are the same in all meaningful respects from this perspective.
A Chicago dog is literally a hamburger with a different surface area. Same obscure ground beef, same vegetables, same bread. Just different dimensions. Who cares about the details, right?
People who make a strong distinction between TLS and SSL are indicating that they know the difference and think you should too, but at a practical level it's the difference between .doc and .docx (fundamentally different but interchangeable to the layman). The boots on the ground mostly care about getting https to work and have minimal consideration for it's inner workings.
1. SSL. For a long time I didn't even know TLS was the "same thing", but even now that I know it is, I still say SSL 9 times out of 10.
2. 38 - Started working in 2011, but my first forays into network programming was in something like 2004-2005.
Looked over onto my other screen and sure enough the function I'd literally minutes before added an if statement to went
public Builder sslCertNotBefore(Instant sslCertNotBefore) {
if (sslCertNotBefore.isAfter(MAX_UNIX_TIMESTAMP)) {
sslCertNotBefore = MAX_UNIX_TIMESTAMP;
}
this.sslCertNotBefore = sslCertNotBefore;
return this;
}
I think possibly part of the problem is that we as programmers typically don't deal with TLS directly. The code above is part of a system I wrote that extracts detailed certificate information from HTTPS connections, and man was it ever a hassle to wrestle all the information I was interested in out of the java standard library.
Sure on the one hand it's easier to not mess up if it's all automatic and out of sight, but at the same time, it's not exactly beneficial to the spread of deeper awareness of how TLS actually works when it's always such a black box.
I think most people call it SSL because they use OpenSSL library to deal with secure communication have SSL in their names. Openssl being the most dominant one). Other libraries are BoringSSL, LibreSSL, wolfSSL etc.
Libraries with TLS in their names are less frequently used
I usually say SSL, because it has a greater chance of being understood than the more correct TLS (nobody uses SSL 3.0 anymore). It's also in the name of many SSL (I mean, TLS) libraries, like the classic OpenSSL.
But yeah, I learned about SSL back in the crypto wars days of the 1990s, back when you had to pirate the so-called "US only" version of Netscape if you wanted decent SSL encryption, so I might be just using the old term out of habit.
1. I say both somewhat 50/50. I say SSL instinctively, and TLS when I think about it and remember we don't say SSL anymore. It's been like that for around 10 years now, before that I'd only say SSL.
2. I started programming professionally in 1998 and I'm in my early 50s.
If I need to specifically say SSL or TLS, it's SSL (as in OpenSSL, LibreSSL, BoringSSL, SSL certificates, Qualys SSL Labs, SSL Server Test). TLS is a made up name for SSL.
I do say e.g. "TLSv1.2" if I need to name the specific protocol, that's about it.
Nobody ever says "TLS Certificate". It's only an "SSL Certificate". On that alone, it's just easier to stick to "SSL" for consistency and everyone knows what you mean.
SSL. Working as a sysadmin since 2010. It just feels more right to me, and honestly, it hasn’t been until recently that I’ve noticed more of a concerted effort to rebrand it to TLS — not sure if that’s just my perception or not.
Aside: I think this shared preference for efficiency/comfort/laziness is big part of why master -> main spread quickly while JavaScript -> ECMAScript never had a chance.
I guess it follows that Twitter/X might never be able to pull off a rebrand again.
Even today, people and marketing pages promote "SSL" term. Unless you specifically google, "What is the deference between SSL and TLS?" most people would have no idea what TLS is.
I always say HTTPS because in the context of my area of speciality, the details of how HTTPS works don't matter and neither do secure communication protocols besides HTTPS.
I work in cybersecurity and all the tools in the firewall/cert world still say "SSL decryption" and "SSL certificate". TLS is just a "major version" of SSL in my mind.
The problem is that TLS was already in widespread use for "thread local storage".
Transport Layer Security is widely documented as beginning in 1999.
I can find references to "Thread Local Storage" going back to at least 1996. That particular term seems more common in the Microsoft (and maybe IBM, does anyone have an OS/2 programming manual?) world at the time; Pthreads (1995) and Unix in general tended to call it "thread-specific data".
It's possible that the highly influential 2001 Itanium ABI document (which directly led to Drepper's TLS paper) brought the term to (widespread) use in the broader Unix world, though Sun (for both Solaris and Java?) was using the term previously. But it's also possible that I'm just missing the reference material.
I don’t doubt that, but I never heard Thread Local Storage until much later than that. While it might well’ve been common within its ecosystem, I don’t think it was widely known outside it.
I might have an OS/2 programming manual. But I don't need it. (-: This was not an OS/2 thing. We had to make map data structures using thread IDs. Or our language runtimes did.
Look to Windows NT rather than to OS/2 for thread-local storage. TlsAlloc() et al. were in the Win32 API right from NT 3.1, I think.
I think SSL is a better fit, actually. In theory TLS could be a transport-layer security mechanism that would let arbitrary protocols run on top of it (like IPSec does), but in practice it's pretty much tied up to TCP sockets. The UDP variant (DTLS, and I suppose QUIC) isn't part of the TLS spec for instance. Of course we have kernel TLS on Linux now, and Windows also has infrastructure like that, but it isn't as easy as setting a flag on a socket to turn TLS on.
Plus, who doesn't like to sound like a snake sometimes? Snakes are badass.
No? The "transport" layer is layer 4 in the 7-layer OSI model (physical/datalink/network/transport/session/presentation/application) and 5-layer IP model (physical/network/internetwork/transport/application). That is: the "transport" provides reliable continuous data-stream abstraction over the lower-layers' discreet and unreliable packets; e.g. TCP.
And that data-stream the interface that TLS provides; to the higher layers it looks like a transport layer.
> This was written in 1996. The language used feels already much different from today's publications. God I feel old.
That depends on which publications you're looking at, just as it did in 1996. An article from LWN [1] today, for example, reads in a fairly similar style. Maybe slightly less stuffy, because it's targeted at a slightly more general audience.
Wait, but didn't TLS 1.0 have significant improvements over SSL 3.0? The article makes it seems that just a couple of things were tweaked just to make it different for the sake of being different.
The main difference is in the padding. When the POODLE attack was pre-announced as only affecting SSL3 and not TLS1.0, that was enough to predict it was going to be a padding oracle.
I think it’s fair to say they’re very similar, with a few “bug fixes”. It’s been a while since I’ve thought about either though, and might be forgetting a few things. I’ve only ever implemented SSL3 and TLS1.0 together, so there may be some details I’m forgetting.
I remember "SSL and TLS: Designing and Building Secure Systems" by Eric Rescorla being really useful to understand the history behind TLS and how we got here. The book was written in 2001 and warned about some issues which turned into CVEs a bit later. You might find used copies for a couple bucks.
I seem to remember that Microsoft's initial implementation used a field in the protocol in an incompatible way to encode that it was a different implementation. I remember people being annoyed at them for deliberately screwing up future compatibility. Does anyone remember the details of this?
IIRC they were using a cipher suite to signal the new version. Cipher suites were basically the only signaling mechanism in SSLv2 (and SSLv3/TLS 1.0 before extensions were introduced).
When TLS 1.3 was finally standardized, there was quite a bit of debate about whether in light of the how different it was from TLS 1.2 we should continue to use the 1.3 version number. ISTR that TLS 2 and TLS 4.0 were both floated--though I don't recall SSL 3.4--but eventually the WG decided to stick with the 1.3 version number we had been using throughout the rest of the process.
> As a part of the cutthroat competition, Microsoft decided to revise the SSL 2 protocol with some additions of their own, and specified a protocol called "PCT" that was derived from SSL 2. It was only supported in IE and IIS.
> Netscape also wanted to address SSL 2 issues, but wasn't going to let Microsoft take leadership/ownership in the standard, so they developed SSL 3.0, which was a more significant departure.
I remember this moment and this is where I realized that Microsoft wasn't always the bad guy here. They had the better implementation and were willing to share it. But Netscape in this instance acted like kids and wouldn't cooperate at all. Which is why this meeting had to occur and by that point it was clear Netscape had lost the browser and it wasn't going to be close.
Hence the quick about face by Netscape to accept what was pretty much Microsoft's proposed solution.
I can't speak to the rest of Microsoft's browser decisions and given the court ruling it's clear they weren't the good guys either but this opened my eyes to the fact that all companies are the bad guys some time:)
Microsoft was the bad guy in a movie where you have a war right before aliens invade and you figure out that there's bigger enemies.
FSF hated Microsoft because they released binaries without source code, they were THE enemy, nowadays, you are lucky if you get a binary to study and modify! The standard from any competitive developer is to hide the binary and source behind a server. Try to study and modify that!
For the FSF, Microsoft releasing binaries without source was reason enough to hat them but it was not the only reason why people, including those in the FSF, hated them. Microsoft was very much a company that used their dominant market position to lock customers in and the competition out. (Remember embraced, extend, extinguish?) The Microsoft of today looks like a cuddly teddy bear in comparision.
> FSF hated Microsoft because they released binaries without source code
I think that's a bit of an oversimplification - FOSS-leaning people had a pretty large set of reasons to dislike and distrust MS back then. "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" was a big one, calling linux/FOSS a cancer, their money and influence being used to fund the whole SCO debacle amongst other things. They were pretty actively evil, not just "closed source".
There was very good reason not to let MS gain de-facto control of an open protocol, because 90s and 00s microsoft would not have hesitated to find ways to use that dominance to screw the competition.
The "velvet sweatshop" one is sufficient, but plenty of others to choose from. Don't have a source at hand but I remember it was known for its "work 3 years there and then you need to retire early from burnout" culture. There's also a really good (and highly depressing) 2001 German documentary around that "feature" called "Leben nach Microsoft" (Life after Microsoft).
> And of course, now, in retrospect, the whole thing looks silly.
Private enterprise should be the last people on earth to be allowed to label themselves. I have many marketer friends I love, but I truly think the practice of trying to pimp businesses to rich individuals has been probably the biggest waste of human effort in history (outside of maybe carbon-capture efforts). We're just stuck with shitty brands, broken products, and stupid consumers who think they're getting the best.
The situation is additionally confused by the fact that the version numbers do not give a good clue to how different the protocols were. Specifically:
SSLv2 was the first widely deployed version of SSL, but as this post indicates, had a number of issues.
SSLv3 is a more or less completely new protocol
TLS 1.0 is much like SSLv3 but with some small revisions made during the IETF standardization process.
TLS 1.1 is a really minor revision to TLS 1.0 to address some issues with the way block ciphers were used.
TLS 1.2 is a moderately sized revision to TLS 1.1 to adjust to advances in cryptography, specifically adding support for newer hashes in response to weaknesses in MD5 and SHA-1 and adding support for AEAD cipher suites such as AES-GCM.
TLS 1.3 is mostly a new protocol though it reuses some pieces of TLS 1.2 and before.
Each of these protocols has been designed so that you could automatically negotiate versions, thus allowing for clients and servers to independently upgrade without loss of connectivity.
> Each of these protocols has been designed so that you could automatically negotiate versions, thus allowing for clients and servers to independently upgrade without loss of connectivity.
And ensuring decades of various downgrade attacks
The downgrade attacks on TLS are only really present in the case of client behaviour where, on failing to achieve one version, they retry a new connection without it.
This was necessary to bypass various broken server side implementations, and broken middleboxes, but wasn’t necessarily a flaw in TLS itself.
But from the learnings of this issue preventing 1.2 deployment, TLS 1.3 goes out of its way to look very similar on the wire to 1.2
Moreover, there's not really much in the way of choices here. If you don't have this kind of automatic version negotiation then it's essentially impossible to deploy a new version.
You could deploy a new version, you'd just have older clients unable to connect to servers implementing the newer versions.
It wouldn't have been insane to rename https to httpt or something after TLS 1.2 and screw backwards compatibility (yes I realize the 's' stands for secure, not 'ssl', but httpt would have still worked as "HTTP with TLS")
Depends on what you mean by "this kind" because you want a way to detect attacker-forced downgrades and that used to be missing.
If a protocol is widely used wrongly, I consider it a flaw in the protocol. But overall, SSL standardization has gone decently well. I always bring it up as a good example to contrast with XMPP as a bad example.
Well, my only real point is that it’s not the version negotiation in TLS that’s broken. It’s the workaround for intolerance of newer versions that had downgrade attacks.
Fortunately that’s all behind us now, and transitioning from 1.2 to 1.3 is going much smoother than 1.0 to 1.2 went.
Well, at least they were not just versioned by year number. ;)
Considering that Microsoft was a completely different beast in that time, I'm not surprised it does not seem that silly.
M$ (appropriate name for that time) of the day was doing its best to own everything and the did not let up on trying to hold back the open source internet technologies until the early 2010's I believe. Its my opinion that they were successful in killing Java Applets, which were never able to improve past the first versions and JavaScript and CSS in general was held back many years.
I still recall my corporate overloards trying to push me to support IE's latest 'technologies' but I resisted and instead started supporting Mozilla 3.0 as soon as they fixed some core JS bugs for our custom built enterprise JavaScript SPA tools in the early 2000's. It turned out to be a great decision as the fortune 500 company started using Mozilla / Firefox in other internal apps in later years long before it became common place.
I don't think it was Microsoft that killed Java applets. I mean, for one thing, they always worked in IE, which was really the only avenue through which MS could have affected them.
No, Java applets failed because they became the poster child for "Java is slow" take. Even though it wasn't exactly true in general, it was certainly true of applets, what with waiting for them to download and then waiting for the JVM to spin up.
What killed them was 1) HTML/JS itself getting better at dynamic stuff that previously required something like applets, and 2) Flash taking over the remaining niche for which HTML wasn't good enough.
Applets died because of many reasons, like absurd startup time for the JRE (often just for silly animations), absurd memory requirements (for the time) and associated crashes, weird compatibility issues in the initial releases of the Java platform, a silly security model based on the assumption that only good actors will be able to get a CA certificate in order to do whatever they want in your PC, an immature sandboxing technology in browsers (not only IE), etc.
> M$ (appropriate name for that time)
It’s even more appropriate nowadays, I’d say.
Never not been appropriate.
Oh wow, I just discovered that my brain unconsciously had a hard time to differentiate between SSL and TLS. And now, after two friggin decades I find out, why!
Same. I feel so dumb now. After 15 years in this industry i finally figured out that ssl and tls are the same.
Back closer to the time, there were some people around who insisted that SSL specifically meant the old versions and it was all TLS now. I recall a couple of occasions where people were talking about UCSPI-SSL and someone stepped in to explain that We Don't Do SSL Now. As the headlined article says, that contrived distinction seems silly with the hindsight of decades.
The nomenclature was complicated in people's minds by SMTP. Because there was SMTP over a largely transparent encrypted connection, and SMTP where it started unencrypted and negotiated a switch, as well as plain old cleartext. It didn't help that RFC 2487 explained that STARTTLS negotiated "TLS more commonly known as SSL". RFC 8314 explains some of the historical mess that SMTP got into with two types of SMTP (relay and submission) and three types of transport.
And the "S" for "submission" could be confused with the "S"s in both "SSL" and "TLS". It's not just TLAs that are ambiguous, indeed. There was confusion over "SMTPS" and "SSMTP", not helped at all by the people who named programs things like "sSMTP".
I'm still calling it SSL in 2025. (-: And so is Erwin Hoffmann.
* https://www.fehcom.de/ipnet/sslserver.html
* https://manpages.debian.org/unstable/ssmtp/ssmtp.8.en.html
No no, they're not. They're names of specific protocols with specific capabilities and versions. "SSL 1.0" and "TLS 1.0" are very different. (see https://aws.amazon.com/compare/the-difference-between-ssl-an...)
The important bits:
- "SSL" is a set of protocols so ridiculously old, busted and insecure that nobody should ever use them. It's like talking about Sanskrit; ancient and dead.
- "TLS" is way better than "SSL", but still there are insecure versions. Any version before 1.2 is no longer supported due to security holes.
- Technically an "ssl certificate" is neither "SSL" nor "TLS", it's really an "X.509 Certificate with Extended Key Usage: Server Authentication". But that doesn't roll off the tongue. You could use a cert from 1996 in a modern TLS server; the problem would be its expiration date, and the hash/signature functions used back then are deprecated. (some servers still support insecure methods to support older clients, which is bad)
The point is more that SSL 3.0 and TLS 1.0 were nearly identical. That is, the breaks in similarity were at SSL 2.0 -> SSL 3.0 (and TLS 1.2 -> TLS 1.3, to a lesser extent), as opposed to the common misconception that TLS 1.0 is what changed everything.
But yes, it's all a bit irrelevant now that anything below TLS 1.2 is sketchy to use.
Right, but they accomplish the same thing and people move monotonically from SSL to TLS. It’s not like choosing between React and Angular, but like choosing between React version 5 and React version 10 for a new project. SSL and TLS are the same in all meaningful respects from this perspective.
Hotdogs and hamburgers are the same in all meaningful respects.
They are not. But a Chicago dog is meaningfully the same as a New York Dog (just with some more vegetables).
A Chicago dog is literally a hamburger with a different surface area. Same obscure ground beef, same vegetables, same bread. Just different dimensions. Who cares about the details, right?
I don’t know of anyone who puts celery salt on a hamburger.
Very weird assertion, and happy to be dragged into a sub-post wasteland with you. <3
People who make a strong distinction between TLS and SSL are indicating that they know the difference and think you should too, but at a practical level it's the difference between .doc and .docx (fundamentally different but interchangeable to the layman). The boots on the ground mostly care about getting https to work and have minimal consideration for it's inner workings.
Curious, when you tell someone they need to access a website securely (or any other case where you might use the term TLS or SSL), do you:
1. Say SSL or TLS?
2. How old are you (or did you start working before 1999?)
I'll reply with my answer too.
1. SSL. For a long time I didn't even know TLS was the "same thing", but even now that I know it is, I still say SSL 9 times out of 10.
2. 38 - Started working in 2011, but my first forays into network programming was in something like 2004-2005.
Looked over onto my other screen and sure enough the function I'd literally minutes before added an if statement to went
I think possibly part of the problem is that we as programmers typically don't deal with TLS directly. The code above is part of a system I wrote that extracts detailed certificate information from HTTPS connections, and man was it ever a hassle to wrestle all the information I was interested in out of the java standard library.Sure on the one hand it's easier to not mess up if it's all automatic and out of sight, but at the same time, it's not exactly beneficial to the spread of deeper awareness of how TLS actually works when it's always such a black box.
I think most people call it SSL because they use OpenSSL library to deal with secure communication have SSL in their names. Openssl being the most dominant one). Other libraries are BoringSSL, LibreSSL, wolfSSL etc.
Libraries with TLS in their names are less frequently used
GnuTLS, mbedTLS, s2n-tls and RustTLS.
SSL is used in websites. TlS is used in other applications, as in mTLS
TLS is absolutely used in websites, and I'm pretty sure modern browsers refuse to use any version of SSL.
I say "https" because sometimes even regular people know what that means.
I usually say SSL, because it has a greater chance of being understood than the more correct TLS (nobody uses SSL 3.0 anymore). It's also in the name of many SSL (I mean, TLS) libraries, like the classic OpenSSL.
But yeah, I learned about SSL back in the crypto wars days of the 1990s, back when you had to pirate the so-called "US only" version of Netscape if you wanted decent SSL encryption, so I might be just using the old term out of habit.
1. I say both somewhat 50/50. I say SSL instinctively, and TLS when I think about it and remember we don't say SSL anymore. It's been like that for around 10 years now, before that I'd only say SSL.
2. I started programming professionally in 1998 and I'm in my early 50s.
These days I tend to say "TLS" more and more, but until just a year or two ago it was almost always "SSL". And "SSL" still slips out occasionally.
I'm 51, started working in IT in the mid 90's.
I say HTTPS certificate.
If I need to specifically say SSL or TLS, it's SSL (as in OpenSSL, LibreSSL, BoringSSL, SSL certificates, Qualys SSL Labs, SSL Server Test). TLS is a made up name for SSL.
I do say e.g. "TLSv1.2" if I need to name the specific protocol, that's about it.
I was working before 1999.
Nobody ever says "TLS Certificate". It's only an "SSL Certificate". On that alone, it's just easier to stick to "SSL" for consistency and everyone knows what you mean.
Reflex is to say SSL but usually correct myself to TLS. Started in IT in 2006 (was a nerd a few years before that though)
Exactly this for me as well. Started a few years earlier.
I second this, started around the same time.
SSL, 27. I would call it `tls` in code, though (and maybe “SSL/TLS” in docs, for clarity).
1) SSL, even though I know the difference. More accurately, I know there is a difference, but SSL gets the point across.
2) before 1999. IIRC, the first SSL certificate I was involved with getting required the use of a fax machine.
SSL - In my 40s, over 20 plus years.
When do I say TLS, when that one annoying guy joins the call that always corrects you. Everyone hates him, and he doesn’t care.
SSL. Working as a sysadmin since 2010. It just feels more right to me, and honestly, it hasn’t been until recently that I’ve noticed more of a concerted effort to rebrand it to TLS — not sure if that’s just my perception or not.
To users: https
To devs: SSL
Did not start working before 1999. Started using Linux in 2003.
TLS: Rolls off the tounge easier. Feels nicer in mouth. Easier to slur smoothly. Flows better on keyboard.
It's the ergonomic choice (;
Aside: I think this shared preference for efficiency/comfort/laziness is big part of why master -> main spread quickly while JavaScript -> ECMAScript never had a chance.
I guess it follows that Twitter/X might never be able to pull off a rebrand again.
(1) SSL
(2) 37. I've been an Internet user since ~1995 and been working in tech since 2004.
SSL, born 1997
TLS. 1989.
Even today, people and marketing pages promote "SSL" term. Unless you specifically google, "What is the deference between SSL and TLS?" most people would have no idea what TLS is.
I always say HTTPS because in the context of my area of speciality, the details of how HTTPS works don't matter and neither do secure communication protocols besides HTTPS.
SSL 42-started studying security in mid 90s as a teen started working 2000
Ah yes, it was a grand time, freeform studying IT security as a teen in the 90s!
I tell my developers to be compliant that they need to use TLS/SSL
1. Cloudflare could probably use my choice of the day as another source for their randomness.
2. Started my first IT job on a computer networking team in 2012.
1. SSL (probably https in that specific scenario)
2. Graduated and started in 2015.
1. SSL 2. Started working in 2000, right on the boundary
I say TLS, and started working in the field in 1994.
SSL, started computer science in 2010
I was going to reply to you and tell you that you're too young to be a curmudgeon, but then I realized, no, I'm just old!
Almost always ssl. Started professionally in 1999. But! mTLS is always mTLS
SSL, started programming in maybe 2012. Possibly because of HTTPS or similarity with SSH.
1. TLS
2. Started working after 1999
1. SSL
2. Started working before 1999
SSL. Started working around 2000.
SSL, 40s
Nice try, targeted advertiser!
Mid 30s, SSL.
I work in cybersecurity and all the tools in the firewall/cert world still say "SSL decryption" and "SSL certificate". TLS is just a "major version" of SSL in my mind.
1. SSL 2. 57
“Transport Layer Security” really is a better name though. I also like to say “TLS”. Two Ses in a row makes you sound like a snake.
The problem is that TLS was already in widespread use for "thread local storage".
Transport Layer Security is widely documented as beginning in 1999.
I can find references to "Thread Local Storage" going back to at least 1996. That particular term seems more common in the Microsoft (and maybe IBM, does anyone have an OS/2 programming manual?) world at the time; Pthreads (1995) and Unix in general tended to call it "thread-specific data".
It's possible that the highly influential 2001 Itanium ABI document (which directly led to Drepper's TLS paper) brought the term to (widespread) use in the broader Unix world, though Sun (for both Solaris and Java?) was using the term previously. But it's also possible that I'm just missing the reference material.
I don’t doubt that, but I never heard Thread Local Storage until much later than that. While it might well’ve been common within its ecosystem, I don’t think it was widely known outside it.
I might have an OS/2 programming manual. But I don't need it. (-: This was not an OS/2 thing. We had to make map data structures using thread IDs. Or our language runtimes did.
Look to Windows NT rather than to OS/2 for thread-local storage. TlsAlloc() et al. were in the Win32 API right from NT 3.1, I think.
I think SSL is a better fit, actually. In theory TLS could be a transport-layer security mechanism that would let arbitrary protocols run on top of it (like IPSec does), but in practice it's pretty much tied up to TCP sockets. The UDP variant (DTLS, and I suppose QUIC) isn't part of the TLS spec for instance. Of course we have kernel TLS on Linux now, and Windows also has infrastructure like that, but it isn't as easy as setting a flag on a socket to turn TLS on.
Plus, who doesn't like to sound like a snake sometimes? Snakes are badass.
No? The "transport" layer is layer 4 in the 7-layer OSI model (physical/datalink/network/transport/session/presentation/application) and 5-layer IP model (physical/network/internetwork/transport/application). That is: the "transport" provides reliable continuous data-stream abstraction over the lower-layers' discreet and unreliable packets; e.g. TCP.
And that data-stream the interface that TLS provides; to the higher layers it looks like a transport layer.
The best name is, whatever was first and stuck.
“SSL” is easier to pronounce, because the tongue barely changes position between the three letters, compared to “TLS”.
picture kaa from the jungle book discussing tcp security and arguing for the s-s-l name. In fact maybe adding a 3rd s.
Related
Randomness and the Netscape Browser January 1996 Dr. Dobb's Journal
https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~daw/papers/ddj-netscape.ht...
This was written in 1996. The language used feels already much different from today's publications. God I feel old.
> This was written in 1996. The language used feels already much different from today's publications. God I feel old.
That depends on which publications you're looking at, just as it did in 1996. An article from LWN [1] today, for example, reads in a fairly similar style. Maybe slightly less stuffy, because it's targeted at a slightly more general audience.
[1] https://lwn.net/
Wait, but didn't TLS 1.0 have significant improvements over SSL 3.0? The article makes it seems that just a couple of things were tweaked just to make it different for the sake of being different.
The main difference is in the padding. When the POODLE attack was pre-announced as only affecting SSL3 and not TLS1.0, that was enough to predict it was going to be a padding oracle.
I think it’s fair to say they’re very similar, with a few “bug fixes”. It’s been a while since I’ve thought about either though, and might be forgetting a few things. I’ve only ever implemented SSL3 and TLS1.0 together, so there may be some details I’m forgetting.
Indeed there are significant changes and improvements, though it’s not a complete redesign like SSL 3.0 was.
I remember "SSL and TLS: Designing and Building Secure Systems" by Eric Rescorla being really useful to understand the history behind TLS and how we got here. The book was written in 2001 and warned about some issues which turned into CVEs a bit later. You might find used copies for a couple bucks.
Would adoption of the new name been easier if the version started at TLS 3.0/matched the SSL version it originated from?
There are still more than 300,000 services on the Internet that support SSLv2:
https://www.shodan.io/search/report?query=ssl.version%3Asslv...
And a trend line of how it's changed:
https://trends.shodan.io/search?query=ssl.version%3Asslv2#ov...
It has dropped significantly though over the years but it will continue to stick around for a while.
But how many clients are still using it? As far as my understanding goes, no relevant, up to date piece of software/library still supports
Wouldn't it be appropriate now to call the next version SSL again? It's still widely used by everyone, so let them keep using it.
There's really not much chance of that, given that the protocol is maintained by the IETF TLS Working Group.
“TLS” is also used in a bunch of places already, too. Updating config file formats and function signatures will be a PITA.
I would like to see it called SSL again, but agree the cure would be worse than the disease.
Please don't give anybody any ideas!
(USB Implementers Forum): "You rang? How about SSL Gen3x2?"
NB: I feel like the consensus was very firmly established by 2014 that SSL 2.0 was gravely flawed (its handshake isn't even properly authenticated).
I like this writing style. Informative, has some flavour/personality, but clear and concise.
This is one of those ones where it's awkward with a certain crowd. At some point SSL was https and class C meant a /24 subnetwork for webmaster types.
I've found that certain crowds will get angry about the vernacular vs a crowd that always understood something a particular way.
In any event, we have to stick with the times, especially with new entrants that stick with the new terms.
1. SSL 2. 33 Started working in tech at 21.
I seem to remember that Microsoft's initial implementation used a field in the protocol in an incompatible way to encode that it was a different implementation. I remember people being annoyed at them for deliberately screwing up future compatibility. Does anyone remember the details of this?
IIRC they were using a cipher suite to signal the new version. Cipher suites were basically the only signaling mechanism in SSLv2 (and SSLv3/TLS 1.0 before extensions were introduced).
tl;dr: politics.
I still like to occasionally refer to TLS 1.3 as "SSL 3.4" to see whether people are aware of the history.
When TLS 1.3 was finally standardized, there was quite a bit of debate about whether in light of the how different it was from TLS 1.2 we should continue to use the 1.3 version number. ISTR that TLS 2 and TLS 4.0 were both floated--though I don't recall SSL 3.4--but eventually the WG decided to stick with the 1.3 version number we had been using throughout the rest of the process.
The version number in the protocol for TLS 1.3 is 03 04. TLS 1.0 is 03 01, and SSL 3.0 is 03 00. Hence "SSL 3.4".
Yes, I understood your reasoning. I'm just saying that I don't think anyone floated calling it SSL 3.4.
[dead]
> As a part of the cutthroat competition, Microsoft decided to revise the SSL 2 protocol with some additions of their own, and specified a protocol called "PCT" that was derived from SSL 2. It was only supported in IE and IIS.
> Netscape also wanted to address SSL 2 issues, but wasn't going to let Microsoft take leadership/ownership in the standard, so they developed SSL 3.0, which was a more significant departure.
I remember this moment and this is where I realized that Microsoft wasn't always the bad guy here. They had the better implementation and were willing to share it. But Netscape in this instance acted like kids and wouldn't cooperate at all. Which is why this meeting had to occur and by that point it was clear Netscape had lost the browser and it wasn't going to be close.
Hence the quick about face by Netscape to accept what was pretty much Microsoft's proposed solution.
I can't speak to the rest of Microsoft's browser decisions and given the court ruling it's clear they weren't the good guys either but this opened my eyes to the fact that all companies are the bad guys some time:)
Forcing the name to be chnaged from SSL to TLS seems pretty petty to me.
Two decades later, and it is still common for people to call TLS SSL.
Microsoft was the bad guy in a movie where you have a war right before aliens invade and you figure out that there's bigger enemies.
FSF hated Microsoft because they released binaries without source code, they were THE enemy, nowadays, you are lucky if you get a binary to study and modify! The standard from any competitive developer is to hide the binary and source behind a server. Try to study and modify that!
For the FSF, Microsoft releasing binaries without source was reason enough to hat them but it was not the only reason why people, including those in the FSF, hated them. Microsoft was very much a company that used their dominant market position to lock customers in and the competition out. (Remember embraced, extend, extinguish?) The Microsoft of today looks like a cuddly teddy bear in comparision.
Microsoft's motto then was "We set the standards".
Flaky, unreliable, not web standards compliant, hosted services suck to deal with.
Who needs to add a CORS header to allow Sentry.io or Cloudflare's metrics to work on this 2014 era SaaS that the developer has wandered away from?
> FSF hated Microsoft because they released binaries without source code
I think that's a bit of an oversimplification - FOSS-leaning people had a pretty large set of reasons to dislike and distrust MS back then. "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" was a big one, calling linux/FOSS a cancer, their money and influence being used to fund the whole SCO debacle amongst other things. They were pretty actively evil, not just "closed source".
There was very good reason not to let MS gain de-facto control of an open protocol, because 90s and 00s microsoft would not have hesitated to find ways to use that dominance to screw the competition.
I agree with your entire statement:)
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice?
> But Netscape in this instance acted like kids
Oh, please.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft
The "velvet sweatshop" one is sufficient, but plenty of others to choose from. Don't have a source at hand but I remember it was known for its "work 3 years there and then you need to retire early from burnout" culture. There's also a really good (and highly depressing) 2001 German documentary around that "feature" called "Leben nach Microsoft" (Life after Microsoft).
And the classic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microserfs
There was really less than zero reason to trust M$ in the 90s and early 00s.
You quoted "in this instance" and then cited completely unrelated problems?
> And of course, now, in retrospect, the whole thing looks silly.
Private enterprise should be the last people on earth to be allowed to label themselves. I have many marketer friends I love, but I truly think the practice of trying to pimp businesses to rich individuals has been probably the biggest waste of human effort in history (outside of maybe carbon-capture efforts). We're just stuck with shitty brands, broken products, and stupid consumers who think they're getting the best.