Oh wow, I just discovered that my brain unconsciously had a hard time to differentiate between SSL and TLS. And now, after two friggin decades I find out, why!
Why SSL was renamed to TLS in late 90s (2014)
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Re: Why SSL was renamed to TLS in late 90s (2014)
#12“Transport Layer Security” really is a better name though. I also like to say “TLS”. Two Ses in a row makes you sound like a snake.
The problem is that TLS was already in widespread use for "thread local storage".
Transport Layer Security is widely documented as beginning in 1999.
I can find references to "Thread Local Storage" going back to at least 1996. That particular term seems more common in the Microsoft (and maybe IBM, does anyone have an OS/2 programming manual?) world at the time; Pthreads (1995) and Unix in general tended to call it "thread-specific data".
It's possible that the highly influential 2001 Itanium ABI document (which directly led to Drepper's TLS paper) brought the term to (widespread) use in the broader Unix world, though Sun (for both Solaris and Java?) was using the term previously. But it's also possible that I'm just missing the reference material.
Re: Why SSL was renamed to TLS in late 90s (2014)
#13tl;dr: politics. I still like to occasionally refer to TLS 1.3 as "SSL 3.4" to see whether people are aware of the history.
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Re: Why SSL was renamed to TLS in late 90s (2014)
#14“Transport Layer Security” really is a better name though. I also like to say “TLS”. Two Ses in a row makes you sound like a snake.
The problem is that TLS was already in widespread use for "thread local storage". Transport Layer Security is widely documented as beginning in 1999. I can find references to "Thread Local Storage" going back to at least 1996. That particular term seems more common in the Microsoft (and maybe IBM, does anyone have an OS/2 programming manual?) world at the time; Pthreads (1995) and Unix in general tended to call it "t…
I don’t doubt that, but I never heard Thread Local Storage until much later than that. While it might well’ve been common within its ecosystem, I don’t think it was widely known outside it.
Re: Why SSL was renamed to TLS in late 90s (2014)
#15> As a part of the cutthroat competition, Microsoft decided to revise the SSL 2 protocol with some additions of their own, and specified a protocol called "PCT" that was derived from SSL 2. It was only supported in IE and IIS. > Netscape also wanted to address SSL 2 issues, but wasn't going to let Microsoft take leadership/ownership in the standard, so they developed SSL 3.0, which was a more significant departure. I…
Forcing the name to be chnaged from SSL to TLS seems pretty petty to me.
Two decades later, and it is still common for people to call TLS SSL.
Re: Why SSL was renamed to TLS in late 90s (2014)
#16“Transport Layer Security” really is a better name though. I also like to say “TLS”. Two Ses in a row makes you sound like a snake.
picture kaa from the jungle book discussing tcp security and arguing for the s-s-l name. In fact maybe adding a 3rd s.
Re: Why SSL was renamed to TLS in late 90s (2014)
#17Oh wow, I just discovered that my brain unconsciously had a hard time to differentiate between SSL and TLS. And now, after two friggin decades I find out, why!
Same. I feel so dumb now. After 15 years in this industry i finally figured out that ssl and tls are the same.
Re: Why SSL was renamed to TLS in late 90s (2014)
#18Would adoption of the new name been easier if the version started at TLS 3.0/matched the SSL version it originated from?
Re: Why SSL was renamed to TLS in late 90s (2014)
#19“Transport Layer Security” really is a better name though. I also like to say “TLS”. Two Ses in a row makes you sound like a snake.
The problem is that TLS was already in widespread use for "thread local storage". Transport Layer Security is widely documented as beginning in 1999. I can find references to "Thread Local Storage" going back to at least 1996. That particular term seems more common in the Microsoft (and maybe IBM, does anyone have an OS/2 programming manual?) world at the time; Pthreads (1995) and Unix in general tended to call it "t…
I might have an OS/2 programming manual. But I don't need it. (-: This was not an OS/2 thing. We had to make map data structures using thread IDs. Or our language runtimes did.
Look to Windows NT rather than to OS/2 for thread-local storage. TlsAlloc() et al. were in the Win32 API right from NT 3.1, I think.
Re: Why SSL was renamed to TLS in late 90s (2014)
#20NB: I feel like the consensus was very firmly established by 2014 that SSL 2.0 was gravely flawed (its handshake isn't even properly authenticated).