sockets and encryption

[Dave Brueck]

On Mon, 25 Nov 2002, Paul Nilsson wrote:

> >Not necessarily - you can create your own certificate authority and have 
> >it issue a certificate for you. On the client side there's a one-line API 
> >call to allow certificates from non-authoritative sources.
> 
> Hmmm, but the software I'm creating will allow multiple clients and
> servers, the servers would have no interaction with each other and
> therefore no certificate authority.

No, that's not how it works. The certificate authority gives you a
certificate file (along with their certificate file) and that's it. It's a
few files on disk that your server uses - there's no interaction with the
certificate authority itself.

> >Not sure what you mean here - it's just a stream of bytes so there's no 
> >concept of ASCII or non-ASCII.
> 
> The only context I've heard ssl used in (although I'm sure it's used
> in a lot of other cases) is people transering *ML code accross the
> internet.

Ever used HTTPS to connect to a website? :)

> Since HTML is ascii and XML is unicode I thought this may put
> some limitations on what raw data could be sent. I had suspected that
> SSL incorporated a unicode layer which could cause problems if I
> wanted to send raw bytes (or I would have to converrt them to CDATA).

Ahh, I understand. Nope, SSL happens at a lower layer so there's no 
concept of ASCII vs binary or unicode. It's just a stream of bytes so 
whether they be HTML or image data or whatever it makes no difference.

Best of luck in whatever you choose,
Dave