Designing Content Switching Solutions

Chapter 11. Back-End SSL Offloading

As described in detail in Chapter 10, “SSL Offloading,” secure encrypted connections are established between the client and the SSL offload. The data still passes unencrypted from the SSL offload to the server. Even though the unencrypted traffic from the SSL offload is usually forwarded on to the internal network, many network and security administrators consider parts of the internal network not to be as secure and would like all client traffic to be encrypted end to end. The back-end SSL offloading solution provides the SSL termination functionality from the client to the server. In addition, after decrypting the session, the SSL offload device re-encrypts it and sends it back to the server.

This chapter introduces ...