What is SSL used for?

Who uses SSL TLS?

It's been about 7 years since I've been asked that question, and it's a pretty good indication of how much SSL TLS usage has grown.

As far as usage numbers go, SSL TLS has been doing quite well. The latest SSL TLS security report from the SSL Labs site (which was updated a few months ago) showed that SSL TLS usage increased around 30% over the last year, with many more sites supporting TLS than the year before. The most interesting metric was that SSL TLS usage grew by a greater percentage than HTTP TLS usage - SSL TLS usage increased by over 3 times as much as HTTP TLS usage.

In this post, I'll share a few additional insights on SSL TLS usage, including analysis of SSL TLS usage by country, and a look at how SSL TLS usage has grown over the years. The data. In order to make the comparisons more straightforward, I've focused on the latest report from the SSL Labs site. This report includes the data from the following 3 months: June 2026. September 2026. December 2026. The number of sites using SSL TLS increased from about 3.5 million sites to 4.2 million sites.

The total number of SSL TLS connections per month increased from about 20 million to 30 million. The average SSL TLS site has a TLS connection rate of 1.6% - a 3x increase over the last year.

The average HTTP TLS site has a TLS connection rate of 1.2%.

The average HTTPS TLS site has a TLS connection rate of 6.7%.

The following chart shows the number of SSL TLS sites per country. The number of SSL TLS sites in each country ranged from 4,000 in the US to 9,000 in Australia. The top 3 countries are the US, Germany and the UK, with the US and UK having more SSL TLS sites than any other country.

The following chart shows the number of SSL TLS connections per country. The top 3 countries are again the US, Germany and the UK. The US has slightly more SSL TLS connections than any other country.

The following chart shows the distribution of the TLS connection rates for SSL TLS sites.

What is SSL used for?

As per the Wikipedia definition: An encrypted socket, or Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), is an Internet protocol that provides confidentiality, authentication, and integrity for data sent between a client and a server. It uses public key cryptography to provide privacy as well as authentication, and it provides for the use of a single encryption key for both directions of the communication.

For the sake of simplicity, let's assume that it's used for two web sites. The first site, main.example.com, has its own .com domain and hosts a blog or an e-commerce web site, for example. The address is . It offers a page for the users who want to register an account with their contact details, such as their name, email address and phone number. The page is called a registration form.

The second site, blog.com, offers a page with a big button. Once the button is clicked, the form from the first site will be submitted and its data sent to the second site via the SSL protocol.

Why would I use SSL if I have a big button? One of the easiest examples is a large banner ad that is clicked on by thousands of people every day. A click-through to a registration form is a very good way to generate more sales through subscriptions, memberships, advertisements, etc.

Another example is an affiliate site. For a publisher, this is always one of the most popular forms of advertisement, because of its low cost and high conversion rate. As you are probably aware, affiliate sites work by referring the visitors to other web sites that might offer higher conversion rates. However, most affiliates place their banners or buttons in the middle of a page that offers content, so it looks like they are just adding some nice decorations. But really, all they are doing is generating some conversions.

How to prevent the user to be redirected to SSL or any other site? There is a feature built into the browsers and it is called HSTS preloading. All you need to do is place this HTTP Header response header in the page:

What is a TLS used for?

I always wanted to learn, and I still do.

Even if it's not as much of a priority as it should be.

TL;DR? SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is a secure encryption method for the Internet, that is used when you want to keep your messages private. It can also be used to encrypt your e-mail using TLS. TLS stands for Transport Layer Security. It started out being used for a protocol named DTLS (Datagram Transport Layer Security). Then in 2026, it was created with RFC 4346 as an upgrade to TLS. The purpose of TLS was originally to secure the Web, allowing for the use of HTTP or HTTPS.

There are different types of TLS connections: HTTP to HTTPS. HTTPS to HTTP. In order to keep the connection encrypted, a certificate is needed. A certificate allows the server to identify itself. This is necessary for the browser to trust the server. If there are multiple certificates issued for the same server, the most recent is used.

In order to trust a certificate, there are four steps: The certificate has to be signed by an organization known to the browser. The certificate has to be trusted by the browser. There has to be a match on the certificate fingerprints. Certificate has to be signed by a Trusted Root Certificate. Steps 1-3 can be performed manually by the user, while Step 4 can be executed automatically by the browser. TLS protocol. You don't need to understand everything that TLS is capable of doing to know that it's a very complicated protocol. If you're interested, check out RFC 5246 - which describes the TLS protocol in details.

There is a lot of interesting content in there. I can't help but to feel a bit overwhelmed by it.

HTTPS protocol. If you just want a quick understanding of the HTTPS protocol, this Wikipedia page is what you're looking for. The HTTP protocol has been standardized back in 1995. Since then, there have been multiple updates to the protocol, resulting in multiple extensions to the protocol. To me, this is quite the dirty laundry list.

What is the difference between TLS and SSL?

TLS (Transport Layer Security) is the most commonly used standard for secure network connections. It is also known as SSL (Secure Socket Layer) in other countries. Both of these acronyms stand for "Transport Layer Security".

TLS is a protocol that runs on top of IP, and is the successor to TCP/IP (the Internet Protocol), which was introduced in 1981. SSL is a protocol that runs on top of TLS. Both are used to create secure communication channels between two devices over the Internet, on networks, or within LANs (Local Area Networks).

If you were a user of the World Wide Web in 1995, chances are you may have seen this type of address. The web page is encrypted and protected by an SSL connection. This means that your browser has used a special protocol called Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) to establish a secure session with the web server.

TLS and SSL are both designed to protect the data passing between the client and the server. However, they differ in how they do this.

TLS: Transport Layer Security. TLS (Transport Layer Security) is a protocol that provides secure communications between clients and servers on the Internet. It is used to transfer messages that are encrypted. Encryption means that messages cannot be read in their entirety, and only the intended recipient can decrypt them.

Encryption can be thought of as a process where messages are "shredded" into smaller pieces. The message is then rearranged and combined again in such a way that it is unrecognizable.

Transport Layer Security works by sending messages from one computer to another. When a message is received at a TLS server, the message is sent back to the sender's computer as an encrypted version of the original message.

In order to decrypt the message, the recipient's certificate (a unique, digital identity for the recipient) must be available to the TLS server. The recipient's certificate is sent back to the server, and the server matches the certificate to a list of trusted certificates. If a match is made, the server sends the decrypted message back to the sender's computer.

The recipient's certificate contains a digital signature of the certificate, and also contains the public key of the recipient. The sender uses the recipient's certificate to encrypt the message using the public key.