Wikipedia is short and to the point on this one > An SSL termination proxy is a proxy server that is used by an institution to handle incoming SSL connections,

Wikipedia is short and to the point on this one > An SSL termination proxy is a proxy server that is used by an institution to handle incoming SSL connections, decrypting the SSL and passing on the unencrypted request to the institution's other servers (it is assumed that the institution's own network is secure so the user's session data does not need to be encrypted on that part of the link). SSL termination proxies are used to reduce the load on the main servers by offloading the cryptographic processing to another machine, and to support servers that do not support SSL, like Varnish. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSL_termination_proxy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSL_termination_proxy