View Source Introduction

Purpose

Transport Layer Security (TLS) and its predecessor, the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), are cryptographic protocols designed to provide communications security over a computer network. The protocols use X.509 certificates and hence public key (asymmetric) cryptography to authenticate the counterpart with whom they communicate, and to exchange a symmetric key for payload encryption. The protocol provides data/message confidentiality (encryption), integrity (through message authentication code checks) and host verification (through certificate path validation). DTLS (Datagram Transport Layer Security) that is based on TLS but datagram oriented instead of stream oriented.

Prerequisites

It is assumed that the reader is familiar with the Erlang programming language, the concepts of OTP, and has a basic understanding of TLS/DTLS.