From the book lists at Adware Report:

 All information current as of 02:06:59 Pacific Time, Monday, 21 February 2005.

SSL & TLS Essentials: Securing the Web

   by Stephen A. Thomas

  Paperback:
    Wiley
    11 February, 2000

   US$26.39 

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Editorial description(s):

From the Back Cover
"Great writing . . . a clear introduction to the most widely deployed security technology in the Internet."--Paul Lambert, former co-chair of IETF IPSEC working group

The Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security(TLS) protocols form the foundation for e-commerce security on the World Wide Web, verifying the authenticity of Web sites, encrypting the transfer of sensitive data, and ensuring the integrity of information exchanged. Now--for the first time the details of these critical security protocols are available in a complete, clear, and concise reference. SSL and TLS Essentials provides complete documentation of the SSL and TLS protocols, including advanced and proprietary extensions never before published. The book thoroughly covers the protocols in operation, including the contents of their messages, message formats, and the cryptographic calculations used to construct them. The text also includes an introduction to cryptography and an explanation of X.509 public key certificates. Stephen Thomas, author of IPng and the TCP/IP Protocols, presents this complex material in a clear and reader-friendly manner. The book includes more than 80 figures and illustrations to supplement its text, and it describes SSL in the context of real-world, practical applications. Readers will immediately understand not only the academic principles behind he security protocols, but how those principles apply to their own network security challenges.

The book includes:

The CD-ROM contains convenient electronic versions of the book for:

Visit our Web site at www.wiley.com/compbooks/


About the Author
STEPHEN THOMAS is CTO of TransNexus, a leading provider of e-commerce solutions for Internet telecommunications. He has been actively involved in Internet protocol development for nearly 20 years and has contributed to numerous Internet Drafts and RFCs. Thomas is also the author of IPng and the TCP/IP Protocols (also from Wiley).


Book Description
"Great writing . . . a clear introduction to the most widely deployed security technology in the Internet."-Paul Lambert, former co-chair of IETF IPSEC working group

The Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security(TLS) protocols form the foundation for e-commerce security on the World Wide Web, verifying the authenticity of Web sites, encrypting the transfer of sensitive data, and ensuring the integrity of information exchanged. Now-for the first time the details of these critical security protocols are available in a complete, clear, and concise reference. SSL and TLS Essentials provides complete documentation of the SSL and TLS protocols, including advanced and proprietary extensions never before published. The book thoroughly covers the protocols in operation, including the contents of their messages, message formats, and the cryptographic calculations used to construct them. The text also includes an introduction to cryptography and an explanation of X.509 public key certificates. Stephen Thomas, author of IPng and the TCP/IP Protocols, presents this complex material in a clear and reader-friendly manner. The book includes more than 80 figures and illustrations to supplement its text, and it describes SSL in the context of real-world, practical applications. Readers will immediately understand not only the academic principles behind he security protocols, but how those principles apply to their own network security challenges.

The book includes:
* Full details of Netscape's SSL and the IETF's TLS protocols, with differences between the two clearl highlighted and explained
* A concise tutorial in cryptography
* Complete coverage of Netscape's International Step-Up and Microsoft's Server Gated Cryptography implementations
* A description of X.509 public key certificates
* Details on implementing backwards compatibility among previous versions of SSL and TLS
* A thorough security checklist with explanations of all known attacks on SSL implementations, along with appropriate countermeasures.

The CD-ROM contains convenient electronic versions of the book for:
* Windows(r) CE handheld computers
* Adobe(r) Acrobat Reader for PCs

Visit our Web site at www.wiley.com/compbooks/




Reader review(s):

Good programmers SSL/TLS reference, October 30, 2000
Anyone who has ordered a book from Amazon.com or made a stock trade via an online broker has used SSL, or Secure Socket Layer. SSL, created by Netscape for managing the security of transmissions on the Internet, is a method of encrypting sensitive data. The "socket" part of the term refers to the sockets network transmission method of passing data back and forth between a client and a server program on a network. SSL is ubiquitous; it is an essential part of every browser shipped today.

SSL and TLS (Transport Layer Security) are essentially the same protocol. While SSL was originally designed by Netscape, the company has since offered SSL as a proposed standard protocol to the World Wide Web Consortium and the Internet Engineering Task Force, and it has since been renamed TLS.

SSL and TLS Essentials provides a thorough look into the inner workings of SSL. The book assumes a basic understanding of cryptography and gets right into the nitty-gritty of SSL functionality. The book is designed for those who need an in-depth and comprehensive look at the inner workings and mechanics of SSL, such as system administrators of e-commerce systems or SSL programmers.

This review of mine originally appears at http://www.securitymanagement.com/library/000934.html

Good book on SSL, May 16, 2000
I thought this book gives a very good intro to SSL as well as getting in depth. It's organized in four parts the first being a high level overview. Each part gets more in depth until the fourth part where you actually see some of the bytes being sent across the wire. This is the only book on SSL that I've been able to find. It does not go in depth on the cryptography side, but if you need to know how the protocol works, it's a great reference. I've been working with SSL libraries for over a year and this book offered a great explanation. I've recommended it to coworkers as an intro to the technology and they've come up to speed very quickly.

Good overview, no samples, little HTTP detail, poor dev supp, July 19, 2000
I got this book to enable SSL support for a custom built web server and web proxy. There are no SSL conversation samples in this book, although conversations are documented and the details are described. There is also very little help for HTTP-specific scenarios (everyone knows HTTP is the biggest user of SSL), especially HTTP proxy servers, documenting any gotchas and how-tos. I'm having a heck of a time getting my proxy server written in Java to facilitate communications between the web server and the web client--one is sending an unexpected EOF and killing the conversation, and I don't know why. The client handshakes and recieves a certificate, but fails to reconnect and handshake again while using the newly recieved certificate. This book doesn't help me in this matter at all. If it's documented in here, it's buried in too much text, blabbering, and descriptions, and is not properly indexed or diagramed, etc. I've spent days trying to get past this road block, and this book was my last hope, but unfortunately didn't provide much hope at all.

This book would be best accompanied with a code samples guide.

Excellent book on SSL, July 9, 2000
This is currently the only book available on the subject, and fortunately it may the only one you will need !

Not only does it explain the SSL protocol thoroughly but also contains invaluable sections of the X.509 certificate and ASN.1

The parts I found most useful were the discussion of the differences between TLS 1.0 and SSL 3.0, and the discussion of international step-up certificates.

Probably the best book on SSL, January 6, 2001
A fantastic book on SSL/TLS. Enlightened me with lots of information which I searched for on web but couldn't find.

By the way, there is some mistake in the book.

Page 48, Figure 3.3: The 'pending read state' is not copied to 'actual read state' upon receiving a change cipher spec(message number 6) from the client. Fortunately, it is correct in page Page 50, Table 3.6, step 6.

Great book for anyone who want to Use SSL & TLS, September 7, 2001
I'm new in Network programming and I'm very interested in
Internet programming so, i wanted to start with some internet protocols like HTTP
by Stephen Thomas "> if u r interested you should go ahead and buy this book

Excellent book for fundamentals of SSL, January 22, 2001
It has been an eye-opener for me in understanding the concepts of SSL. A must read book for people to get a head start with SSL.
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