Secure Sockets Layer

A suite of cryptographic algorithms, protocols and procedures used to provide security for communications used to access the world wide web.

The characters "https:" at the front of a URL cause SSL to be used to enhance communications security. More recent versions of SSL are known as TLS (Transport Level Security) and are standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).

SSL is a predecessor of TLS and is considered a vulnerability if it is supported in a product.