So far, we have been using plain connections to communicate with a remote HTTP server. Despite the fact that these kinds of connections might fit your application requirements when the data exchanged is not sensitive, there are use cases where we must use a secure channel to send or receive, preventing any third party from reading or changing the data exchanged on the network.
In order to setup an SSL session with a remote server, our client, with the help of some cryptographic tools, will create a cryptographic communication channel where all the data is encrypted with a symmetric cipher that uses a secret key exchanged during the secure connection handshake. Apart from that, the content received and encrypted with a previously exchanged secret key is validated against other peer public keys to prove that the data is coming and signed from the right source.
During the connection establishment, as part of the SSL handshake, the server has to prove that...