

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 IETF3, described in [RFC5246]. The protocol provides confidentiality, and authentication layers over any reliable transport layer. The description, above, refers to TLS 1.0 but applies to all other TLS versions as the differences between the protocols are not major.

The DTLS protocol, or “Datagram TLS” [RFC4347] is a 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.


