What are SSL and SHTTP?
SSL (Secure Socket Layer) and SHTTP (Secure HTTP) and are proposed encryption and user authentication standards for the Web. The basic idea behind the encryption is to encode the text of a message with a key. There are two ways to encrypt — 1) symmetric – the same key is used for encoding and decoding, and 2) asymmetric – one key is used for encoding and another for decoding. In the latter there is a pair of keys that work together, with one being the public key for encoding, and the other being a private key for decoding. A typical implementation would use both – an asymmetric system would be used to transmit a symmetric key good for the current session. For this to work in a web environment, you need the scheme built into the browser and the server. SSL is Netscape’s answer. It uses low level encryption to encrypt transactions in higher-level protocols such as HTTP, NNTP and FTP. SSL is (currently) only for Netscape browsers and some Netscape servers. I have not had experience with
