With OpenSSL, we can encrypt information on the fly as it goes across the network. There's no need to manually encrypt our data before we send it across the network because OpenSSL encryption happens automatically. This is important because online commerce and banking couldn't exist without it.
The Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) in OpenSSL is the protocol. Ironically, even though we're using the OpenSSL suite of programs and libraries, we no longer want to use SSL. Instead, we now want to use the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol . SSL is full of legacy code and a lot of vulnerabilities that go along with that legacy code. TLS is newer, and is much more secure. But, even when working with TLS, we can still use the OpenSSL suite.
One reason that the older SSL protocol is so bad is because of past government regulations...