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Definition: SSL


(1) (Solid State Lighting) See LED lighting.

(2) (Secure Sockets Layer) An earlier security protocol that was the Internet standard prior to TLS. Developed by Netscape, SSL was widely used to validate the identity of a website and create an encrypted connection. See OpenSSL.

SSL and TLS
SSL was superseded by TLS (Transport Layer Security), which came out in 1999 and is very similar to the last SSL version 3.0 in 1996. They are not interoperable; and websites have had to support both for a period of time (SSL/TLS and TLS/SSL). See TLS.