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Why SSL was renamed to TLS in late 90s (2014)
- yardstick 1y agoWould adoption of the new name been easier if the version started at TLS 3.0/matched the SSL version it originated from?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- WhyNotHugo 1y agoI like this writing style. Informative, has some flavour/personality, but clear and concise.
- userbinator 1y agotl;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.
- pinoy420 1y ago[dead]
- ekr____ 1y agoWhen 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.
- userbinator 1y agoThe 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".
- ekr____ 1y agoYes, I understood your reasoning. I'm just saying that I don't think anyone floated calling it SSL 3.4.
- pkulak 1y ago“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.
- jeroenhd 1y agoI 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.
- LukeShu 1y agoNo? 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.
- aoetalks 1y agoI was about to agree with you, and then I read the article on DTLS. > And that data-stream the interface that TLS provides That’s exactly the problem. You might lose a UDP packet. That would corrupt data encrypted with stream cipher. With DTLS, each packet is encrypted individually. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datagram_Transport_Layer_Security https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datagram_Transport_Layer_Sec...
- ekr____ 1y agoJust on a technical note, TLS 1.3 only uses AEAD ciphers where the nonce is determined by the record numbers, so it actually is in principle possible to decrypt the packets even if they are received out of order by trial decrypting with different record numbers. You don't do this in TLS (as opposed to DTLS) because it runs over TCP and therefore you are guaranteed in-order delivery. DTLS, by contrast, provides a record number hint (the low order bits of the record number and epoch) to assist in record number reconstruction: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9147.html#name-reconstructing-the-sequence https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9147.html#name-reconstruct....
- chollida1 1y ago> 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:)
- TZubiri 1y agoMicrosoft 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!
- chollida1 1y agoI agree with your entire statement:)
- simfree 1y agoFlaky, 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?
- II2II 1y agoFor 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.
- amenghra 1y agoI 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.
- ricardo81 1y agoThis 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.
- ahofmann 1y agoOh 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!
- oc1 1y agoSame. I feel so dumb now. After 15 years in this industry i finally figured out that ssl and tls are the same.
- 0xbadcafebee 1y agoNo 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-and-tls/ 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)
- MOARDONGZPLZ 1y agoRight, 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.
- 0xbadcafebee 1y agoHotdogs and hamburgers are the same in all meaningful respects.
- tptacek 1y agoNB: 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).
- albert_e 1y agoRelated Randomness and the Netscape Browser January 1996 Dr. Dobb's Journal https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~daw/papers/ddj-netscape.html 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.
- quietbritishjim 1y ago> 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/ https://lwn.net/
- cubes 1y agoThe authors of that article got pictured on the cover of the New York Times for finding that security issue: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/15/technology/researchers-find-flaw-in-an-online-encryption-method.html https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/15/technology/researchers-fi...
- albert_e 1y agoInteresting link - thanks. Was it the same issue though -- the Netscape SSL issue is from year 1996. The linked NYT article is about vulnerability with public key encryption dated 2012 by different authors.
- disruptiveink 1y agoWait, 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.
- layer8 1y agoIndeed there are significant changes and improvements, though it’s not a complete redesign like SSL 3.0 was.
- mcpherrinm 1y agoThe 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.
- nextgens 1y agoTLS1.0 introduced modularity via the concept of "extensions". It's everything but a minor evolution of the protocol.
- timdierks 1y agoThe tweaks were minor (smaller than for any other version revision), and mostly just the IETF marking its territory and doing something other than blessing the SSL 3.0 protocol as-is.
- jedberg 1y agoCurious, 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.
- aniviacat 1y ago1. TLS 2. Started working after 1999
- jedberg 1y ago1. SSL 2. Started working before 1999
- curmudgeon22 1y agoSSL, started computer science in 2010
- jedberg 1y agoI 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!
- gryfft 1y agoReflex is to say SSL but usually correct myself to TLS. Started in IT in 2006 (was a nerd a few years before that though)
- jozvolskyef 1y agoI second this, started around the same time.
- romanhn 1y agoExactly this for me as well. Started a few years earlier.
- Rendello 1y ago
- aag 1y agoI 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?
- ekr____ 1y agoIIRC 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).
- pharos92 1y ago1. SSL 2. 33 Started working in tech at 21.
- ekr____ 1y agoThe 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.
- cortesoft 1y ago> 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
- mcpherrinm 1y agoThe 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
- ekr____ 1y agoMoreover, 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.
- Timothycquinn 1y agoConsidering 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.
- notpushkin 1y ago> M$ (appropriate name for that time) It’s even more appropriate nowadays, I’d say.
- eptcyka 1y agoNever not been appropriate.
- twodave 1y agoYeah, it’s just that Googl€, A₽₽le, etc. have all caught up with them. If they’re all the same then there’s less of a need to differentiate anymore.
- notpushkin 1y agoA₽₱le!
- lukas099 1y agoM$ used to be an appropriate name for Microsoft. It still is, but it used to be, too.
- achillean 1y agoThere are still more than 300,000 services on the Internet that support SSLv2: https://www.shodan.io/search/report?query=ssl.version%3Asslv2&title=Services%20on%20SSLv2 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#overview 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.
- NoahZuniga 1y agoBut how many clients are still using it? As far as my understanding goes, no relevant, up to date piece of software/library still supports
- esseph 1y agoAhaha If you look around you'll find services, today, that haven't been upgraded in decades.
- webprofusion 1y agoPeople 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.
- entuno 1y agoThe main issue was explaining to the layman that TLSv1.0 was in fact newer and better than SSLv2 and SSLv3. I remember having quite a few discussions about this with people who assumed that the bigger number must be better..
- ozim 1y agoIt is like ages since SSL was obsoleted but people still refer to the name meaning encrypted network traffic. Would be much easier if everyone just talks about TLS to mean modern encrypted network traffic. Mention SSL if you really use it because you have legacy system running.
- bux93 1y agoI've taken to saying HTTPS, which is far more widely understood and usually accurate enough.
- casper14 1y agoUntil you TLS a tcp connection of course
- dylan604 1y agoPeople still say Twitter instead of X. Of course people are going to continue using the name used when something was first introduced and engrained into their day to day vs the rebrand. It would be funny if ssl.com just redirects to tls.com and get upset when people still refer to it as ssl. The only successful rebrand attempts have been company names like when Comcast became Xfinity or MCI becoming Worldcom type situations
- aramattamara 1y agoWouldn'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.
- klysm 1y agoPlease don't give anybody any ideas!
- anonymars 1y ago(USB Implementers Forum): "You rang? How about SSL Gen3x2?"
- notpushkin 1y ago“TLS” is also used in a bunch of places already, too. Updating config file formats and function signatures will be a PITA.
- MBCook 1y agoI would like to see it called SSL again, but agree the cure would be worse than the disease.
- ekr____ 1y agoThere's really not much chance of that, given that the protocol is maintained by the IETF TLS Working Group.
- OhNotAPaper 1y ago> 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.
- ensocode 1y agoThanks for sharing! I was always wondering and didn't know about the background.
- cubes 1y agoThis brought me back. I was a member of the UC Berkeley Computer Science Undergraduate Association (https://www.csua.berkeley.edu https://www.csua.berkeley.edu) in the early aughts. Through the CSUA I came across a job posting for a sysadmin job at Skotos Tech (https://www.skotos.net/ https://www.skotos.net/), the multiplayer text games company Christopher Allen founded after his work at Consensus Development/Certicom to develop the SSL/TLS implementation for Netscape. It's been a long and strange road.
- timdierks 1y agoIt has definitely been that.
- irusensei 1y agoI’m curious when the certificate authority thing started and how old browsers interpreted self signed certificates.
- tdiff 1y agoAnd it does not help that major tls implementation is called openssl with its own versioning
- nottorp 1y agoWithout reading the article, is the reasoning similar to how the USB consortium chooses numbers and names?
- ahofmann 1y agono
- b0a04gl 1y ago[dead]
- sslbits 1y agohuh?
- dana321 1y agoSolid State Logic (SSL)
- lowbloodsugar 1y agotitle: “Why” Article: (literal quote): “for some reason”.