sockets and encryption

[Paul Nilsson]

On 25 Nov 2002 11:25:01 +0100, an infinite amount of monkeys hijacked
the computer of martin at v.loewis.de (Martin v. Loewis) and wrote:

>This is a misconception. Neither is HTML ascii, nor is XML unicode.
>When transmitted over the wire, both are byte strings.
>
>By "XML is Unicode", people usually mean that an XML document is
>*conceptually* a sequence of Unicode characters. The same is true for
>HTML (formally atleast since HTML 3.0 or so; conceptually, you can
>apply this view for all HTML versions).
>
>When represented in a byte-oriented medium, an encoding has to be
>applied to the sequence of Unicode characters. Both HTML and XML allow
>usage of arbitrary encodings: "ASCII", "iso-8859-1", "utf-8", you name
>them, we have them.

I understand that then encoding must be translated to a byte stream,
however this wasn't my concern. I was meaning to imply that my limited
knowledge of SSL had only seen it used in applications transferring
data in defined character sets, Such as unicode. I was not sure if it
was even possible to open up an SSL connection and use it for a pure
bytestream.

My other problem about SSL is that I thought it required a cerificate,
I didn't know how this worked, and I certainly didn't want to pay for
a certificate nor go through the hassle of setting up an authority
especially for this program. I know that since it was a custom client
and server (ie. I'm not creating a server which needs to interoperate
with clients which already understand the SSL protocol) there should
be no problem using RSA keys to establish the connection and blowfish
to trnsfer data, in a similar way to how SSH works.

Thanks for clearing up a few misconceptions thou :)

Cheers, Paul