Category — Page 4

SSL History — Page 4

50 guides on the protocol's timeline, its biggest security failures, and how certificates went from expensive to free.

A Brief History of Certificate Transparency Logs

From a Google research proposal to a mandatory requirement for public trust.

The History of HSTS and the HSTS Preload List

A header specification that grew into a permanent, hardcoded list inside browser source code.

Why Maximum Certificate Validity Keeps Getting Shorter

From five-year certificates to a shrinking industry ceiling, with more reductions actively discussed.

The Story of Netscape's Original SSL Implementation

Built by a small team in the early 1990s to make e-commerce on the web plausible at all.

How the First HTTPS Website Ever Came Online

A quiet technical milestone that took two more decades to become the web's default.

The History of Wildcard Certificates

A feature that emerged once organizations started running many subdomains worth securing at once.

A History of the CA/Browser Forum and Its Baseline Requirements

The industry body that turned certificate issuance from ad-hoc practice into an audited standard.

The 2017 Symantec Certificate Mass-Distrust Timeline

A multi-year saga ending in one of the largest CA trust removals browsers have ever executed.

How OCSP Stapling Became the Default

A privacy and performance fix for OCSP, gradually adopted until it became standard practice.

The History of Perfect Forward Secrecy Adoption

From an optional cipher suite choice to a mandatory property of every TLS 1.3 session.