SSL, TLS and VPN

SSL

Secure Sockets Layer is the standard security technology for establishing an encrypted link between a web server and a browser, ensuring that your data successfully passes between the web servers while keeping browsers private. SSL is used by most websites for the protection of its customers’ online transactions. You may recognize this from those times you have visited a website and a message pops up informing you that there was an issue with web page’s SSL certificate. The reason behind these situations is that a typical SSL certificate contains the company’s domain name, full name, address, city and country alongside the expiration date of the certificate. Whenever any of these checks fail your browser will show you this error message, warning that the website you want to connect to is not secured by SSL.

However, nowadays SSL is being disabled on websites around the world since SSL 3.0 is now completely insecure ever since it became older and its components are outdated, meaning it’s now unable to properly protect from virtual troublemakers. The U.S. government has specifically warned everyone to not use this protocol for sensitive communication.

TLS

Transport Layer Security is the newer and natural evolution of SSL 3.0. The following versions of this kind of technology – such as TLS 1.1 and 1.2 – are now considerably safer since the majority of previous vulnerabilities have been fixed. This makes the newer versions of TLS, if accurately configured, impenetrable to dangerous attacks since it features strong ciphers and encryption methods. However, many websites up until this day still don’t support nor use the newer and stronger versions of the TLS protocol, therefore utilizing weaker and more vulnerable encryption ciphers.

Fortunately, many VPN providers have learned about the issues coming from the weaknesses of SSL 3.0 and TLS 1.0, and have updated their services to include the newer TLS protection used by the various protocols, such as OpenVPN and SSTP.

Also, TLS 1.3 is currently in a working draft form, though the details are provisional and incomplete. However, it is expected to become a natural evolution of the previous versions by providing extra security features, such as new ciphers, digital signatures algorithms and key exchange protocols.

The same happens when choosing a VPN. Nowadays most providers already feature the latest protection – since VPNs are meant to be used as a security and anonymity tool – so you won’t have to dig too deep. You’ll want to find a VPN that assures certain protocols are available, such as OpenVPN, SSTP, or more uncommon ones like SoftEther.