3. Introduction to TLS and DTLS

TLS stands for “Transport Layer Security” and is the successor of SSL, the Secure Sockets Layer protocol [SSL3] designed by Netscape. TLS is an Internet protocol, defined by IETF(4), described in [RFC5246] The protocol provides confidentiality, and authentication layers over any reliable transport layer. The description, below, refers to TLS 1.0 but also applies to TLS 1.2 [RFC5246] since the differences of these protocols are not major.

The DTLS protocol, or “Datagram TLS” [RFC4347] protocol with identical goals as TLS, but can operate under unreliable transport layers, such as UDP. The discussions below apply to this protocol as well, except when noted otherwise.