TLS is how strangers on the Internet prove they are who they claim to be—and how your secrets stay secret while crossing networks you don't control.
Every version of TLS exists because someone broke the last one. From Netscape's secret SSL 1.0 to quantum-resistant futures, the history of secure communication is a story of trust built, shattered, and rebuilt.
Symmetric encryption is fast but requires sharing a secret. Asymmetric encryption solves that problem but is slow. TLS uses both—a clever hack that's secured the Internet for decades.
The TLS handshake solves an impossible-sounding problem: agreeing on a secret with a stranger while everyone watches. Here's how your browser and a server establish trust in milliseconds.
A cipher suite is a contract between client and server—the cryptographic rules they'll follow to protect their conversation. Understanding what's in that contract tells you whether your connection is actually secure.
Your encrypted conversations from 2015 could be sitting on a hard drive somewhere, waiting. Perfect Forward Secrecy is why that doesn't matter.
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