SSL

Available under Creative Commons-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) was created by Netscape for managing the security of message transmissions in a network. SSL uses public-key encryption to encode the transmission of secure messages (e.g., those containing a credit card number) between a browser and a Web server.

The client part of SSL is part of Netscape's browser. If a Web site is using a Netscape server, SSL can be enabled and specific Web pages can be identified as requiring SSL access. Other servers can be enabled by using Netscape's SSLRef program library, which can be downloaded for noncommercial use or licensed for commercial use.