Secure Socket Layer and its Security Analysis

Abstract

The Internet is an insecure medium for communication which leads to substantial security breaches, that is, a possible loss of confidentiality, integrity or site authentication which affects the user severely. To mitigate these insecure communication problems, secure socket layer (SSL) comes into consideration. But SSL is vulnerable to many criminal activities like attackers can hide malware in encrypted content and launch various attacks.  This arises the need to rethink about the security and privacy provided by the SSL. So the paper provides detailed description of SSL, its vulnerabilities, various attacks and their countermeasures. It also discusses the ways to scan the SSL traffic for malware detection.