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.
> 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!
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.
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)
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.
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.
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?
1. Say SSL or TLS?
2. How old are you (or did you start working before 1999?)
I'll reply with my answer too.
I'm 51, started working in IT in the mid 90's.
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.
2. Started working before 1999
> 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:)
Two decades later, and it is still common for people to call TLS SSL.
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!
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
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)
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.
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.
Plus, who doesn't like to sound like a snake sometimes? Snakes are badass.
And that data-stream the interface that TLS provides; to the higher layers it looks like a transport layer.
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.
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/
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.
I still like to occasionally refer to TLS 1.3 as "SSL 3.4" to see whether people are aware of the history.