The First Few Milliseconds of an HTTPS Connection
The First Few Milliseconds of an HTTPS Connection What happens when one clicks on "Proceed to Checkout" on a website after browsing through their offerings? This is an analysis of the first milliseconds when an HTTPS connection with Amazon is established. A new page is loaded when proceeding to checkout: In the 220 milliseconds that flew by, a lot of interesting stuff happened to make Firefox change the address bar color and put a lock in the lower right corner. With the help of Wireshark , my favorite network tool, and a slightly modified debug build of Firefox, we can see exactly what's going on. By agreement of RFC 2818 , Firefox knew that "https" meant it should connect to port 443 at Amazon.com: Most people associate HTTPS with SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) which was created by Netscape in the mid 90's . This is becoming less true over time. As Netscape lost market share, SSL's maintenance moved to the Internet Engineering Tas...