Privacy
The content of a message transmitted over the Internet can't be understood by a casual (or determined) observer.
Integrity
The contents of a message received are correct and has not been tampered with.
Authentication
Both the sender and receiver of a message can be sure of each other's identity.
SSL was originally developed by Netscape, and there are two versions: SSL v2.0 and SSL v3.0. We don't detail the differences here, but Version 3.0 supports more security features than 2.0. The SSL protocol isn't a standard as such, and the Transport Layer Security 1.0 (TLS) protocol has been proposed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) as an SSL v3.0 replacement.
To understand how SSL works, you need to consider how browsers and web servers actually send and receive HTTP messages. Browsers send HTTP requests by calling on the host systems' TCP/IP networking software, the software that does the work of sending and receiving data over the Internet. When a request is to be sent-for example when a user clicks on a hypertext link-the browser formulates the HTTP request in memory and uses the host's TCP/IP network service to send the request to the server. TCP/IP doesn't care that the message is HTTP; it is only responsible for getting the complete message to the destination. When a web server receives a message, data is read from its host's TCP/IP service and then interpreted as HTTP.
