Summary

SSL is generally not very well understood by the majority of Web developers. Due to its impact on security, it is essential that you develop a good understanding of SSL, including how it can help protect your data and how you can use it in your own applications appropriately. You should now have a good understanding of the role of a certificate authority, an SSL certificate, the difference between symmetric and asymmetric cryptography, and the different methods that are available to lessen the performance impact of SSL.

The following chapter discusses Transport Layer Security, TLS, which is the formally standardized version of SSL that is maintained by the Internet Engineering Task Force.