Difference between SSL & TLS

Question

According to wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_Layer_Security

Seems like TLS is a replacement to SSL, but most websites are still using SSL?

Answer 1

In short, TLSv1.0 is more or less SSLv3.1. You can find more details in this question on ServerFault.

Most websites actually support both SSLv3 and TLSv1.0 at least, as this study indicates (Lee, Malkin, and Nahum's paper: Cryptographic Strength of SSL/TLS Servers: Current and Recent Practices, IMC 2007) (link obtained from the IETF TLS list). More than 98% support TLSv1+.

I think the reason why SSLv3 is still in use was for legacy support (although most browsers support TLSv1 and some TLSv1.1 or even TLSv1.2 nowadays). Until not so long ago, some distributions still had SSLv2 (considered insecure) on by default along with the others.

(You may also find this question interesting, although it's about the usage pattern of TLS rather than SSL vs. TLS (you could in fact have the same pattern with SSL). This does not apply to HTTPS anyway, since HTTPS uses SSL/TLS from the beginning of the connection.)

Answer 2

From http://www.thoughtcrime.org/blog/ssl-and-the-future-of-authenticity/

In the early 90’s, at the dawn of the World Wide Web, some engineers at Netscape developed a protocol for making secure HTTP requests, and what they came up with was called SSL. Given the relatively scarce body of knowledge concerning secure protocols at the time, as well the intense pressure everyone at Netscape was working under, their efforts can only be seen as incredibly heroic. It’s amazing that SSL has endured for as long as it has, in contrast to a number of other protocols from the same vintage. We’ve definitely learned a lot since then, though, but the thing about protocols and APIs is that there’s very little going back.

There were two major updates to the SSL protocol, SSL 2 (1995) and SSL 3 (1996). These were carefully done to be backwards compatible, to ease adoption. However backwards compatibility is a constraint for a security protocol for which it can mean backwards vulnerable.

Thus it was decided to break backwards compatiblity, and the new protocol named TLS 1.0 (1999). (In hindsight, it might have been clearer to name it TLS 4)

The differences between this protocol and SSL 3.0 are not dramatic, but they are significant enough that TLS 1.0 and SSL 3.0 do not interoperate.

TLS has been revised twice, TLS 1.1 (2006) and TLS 1.2 (2008).

As of 2015, all SSL versions are broken and insecure (the POODLE attack) and browsers are removing support. TLS 1.0 is ubiquitous, but only 60% of sites support TLS 1.1 and 1.2, a sorry state of affairs.

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If you're interested in this stuff, I recommend Moxie Marlinspike's clever and funny talk at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7Wl2FW2TcA