15.9. Supporting Secure Content Access

The Secure Socket Layer (SSL) protocol [Freier et al. 1996] has become the standard for authenticating Web servers and protecting the privacy of information transmitted over the Internet. It is therefore important that CDNs be capable of supporting SSL-protected traffic. This section highlights the most important issues SSL-protected traffic faces in a CDN environment. A content distribution network using other secure protocols, such as IP Security Protocol (IPSec), would face many of the same problems.

15.9.1. SSL Overview

On a very high level the properties of the SSL protocol can be summarized as follows.

  • The server is authenticated so that a client can be sure that data comes from the site to which the ...

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