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What is the difference between SSL and TLS?

What is the difference between SSL and TLS? What type of usages we have for each protocol?

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SSL is Secure Sockets Layer and was originally developed by Netscape. It uses a private key to encrypt communication. TLS is Transport Layer Security. It comes from the IETF and has differences in cryptography that renders it incompatible with SSL. Both use TCP. For more detailed information check the following:

SSL 3.0 specification: http://wp.netscape.com/eng/ssl3/
TLS working group and RFC 2246: http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/tls-charter.html

This was first published in September 2003

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