SSL has been widely accepted on the Internet as the preferred, secure protocol to authenticate and encrypt communication between clients and servers. Where HTTPS only secures individual messages, SSL secures the points of origin and destination for any amount of data that can be transmitted between a client and server. This protocol further complements and extends the security measures available to protect the confidentiality of your communications.

The SSL protocol resides above the network protocol, as defined by Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), and directly below the application protocols, such as HTTP, HTTPS, or IMAP. It uses TCP/IP on behalf of the application protocols and, in the process, enables the following activities to occur:

OpenEdge supports SSL communications between the WebSpeed Messenger and the WebSpeed Transaction Server, as described in the next section.