Wednesday, May 2, 2012

SSL: It Cripples Your Software, Freely

It does not seem to go away after you hooked in the Secure Socket Layer library to your source, opened or closed. Programmers added it because it was easy, yet they noticed how much harder their software evolved in refactored code. It is almost contagious by many examples, yet nobody considered it viral. SSL individualized your network connection, which made that practically impossible for bulk messages with credentials of more than one individual.

Those who are most in favor of SSL have shown much dislike for multiplexed communication channels. I even thought the contributors of SSL made the motives, behind their dislike, their intent behind the software over time through its development. I gathered that impression by how the Internet evolved from dial-up mode to “single access” digital subscriber lines. Further, that intent seemed clearer by wave, after wave, of spoken security concerns of wireless routers, which made hop-by-hop mode practically impossible, for now. Free Wi-Fi now encourages open routers such that they enable public access instead of single access, and that weighed in on the exposure of how crippled the networks became.

With IPv6 now enabled, commercial internet providers that demanded single access no longer have the strength behind their concerns as they did before. While SSL still works good for IPv4, there is now other means for security where there exists more than individual content. There are more possibilities on how protocols, that already exist, expand due to the the difference in nature between IPv4 and IPv6. Where someone once said multiplexed content is not possible, we found IPv6 cleanly encapsulates various content much like how the lower transport layer already does that.

Within the SSL software, the authors had some hooks that handled the individualized content. Now, those authors wanted additional code such that the software handles more than one individual. The key point is how the software switches from the credentials of one piece of content to credentials of another piece of content. SSL does not switch credentials that easy, and that friction became the cripple point.