alt Hacker News“Transport Layer Security” really is a better name though. I also like to say “TLS”. Two Ses in a row makes you sound like a snake.
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I think SSL is a better fit, actually. In theory TLS could be a transport-layer security mechanism that would let arbitrary protocols run on top of it (like IPSec does), but in practice it's pretty much tied up to TCP sockets. The UDP variant (DTLS, and I suppose QUIC) isn't part of the TLS spec for instance. Of course we have kernel TLS on Linux now, and Windows also has infrastructure like that, but it isn't as easy as setting a flag on a socket to turn TLS on.
Plus, who doesn't like to sound like a snake sometimes? Snakes are badass.
“SSL” is easier to pronounce, because the tongue barely changes position between the three letters, compared to “TLS”.
The best name is, whatever was first and stuck.
picture kaa from the jungle book discussing tcp security and arguing for the s-s-l name. In fact maybe adding a 3rd s.
The problem is that TLS was already in widespread use for "thread local storage".
Transport Layer Security is widely documented as beginning in 1999.
I can find references to "Thread Local Storage" going back to at least 1996. That particular term seems more common in the Microsoft (and maybe IBM, does anyone have an OS/2 programming manual?) world at the time; Pthreads (1995) and Unix in general tended to call it "thread-specific data".
It's possible that the highly influential 2001 Itanium ABI document (which directly led to Drepper's TLS paper) brought the term to (widespread) use in the broader Unix world, though Sun (for both Solaris and Java?) was using the term previously. But it's also possible that I'm just missing the reference material.