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Learn how TLS, SSL, and CA work

Bryant Jimin Son
6 min readNov 15, 2020

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Multiple times every day, you visit websites that ask you to log in with your username or email address and password. Banking websites, social networking sites, email services, e-commerce sites, and news sites are just a handful of the types of sites that use this mechanism.

Every time you sign into one of these sites, you are, in essence, saying, “yes, I trust this website, so I am willing to share my personal information with it.” This data may include your name, gender, physical address, email address, and sometimes even credit card information.

But how do you know you can trust a particular website? To put this a different way, what is the website doing to secure your transaction so that you can trust it?

This article aims to demystify the mechanisms that make a website secure. I will start by discussing the web protocols HTTP and HTTPS and the concept of Transport Layer Security (TLS), which is one of the cryptographic protocols in the internet protocol’s (IP) layers. Then, I will explain certificate authorities (CAs) and self-signed certificates and how they can help secure a website. Finally, I will introduce some open source tools you can use to create and manage certificates.

Securing routes through…

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Bryant Jimin Son
Bryant Jimin Son

Written by Bryant Jimin Son

A cloud practitioner talking about technology, travels & career tips. But I will sometimes cover financial advises and some random stuffs.

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