: What books or articles are must reads for learning about SSL management I have found it very hard to find any books or articles that assume no understanding and take you from nothing to a

@Sims2060225

In addition to Wikipedia, the MDN also has a few good introductions to SSL, as the Mozilla foundation sponsors NSS and an assortment of other PKI projects.

If you're looking for an all around SSL/TLS book, SSL and TLS: Designing and Building Secure Systems would be a good choice, as it discusses the workings of SSL, its strengths and limitations, as well as safe design patterns for implementing SSL across a variety of applications, including web servers and email clients.

You can also check out the Open-Source PKI Book, which is a free open source book on the various open source PKI implementations.

The problem with a book on SSL management is that SSL is used for so many different purposes and with so many different applications. How you set up or manage SSL certificates for web servers depends on what web server, OS and other PKI software you're using.

A lot of CAs and vendors (IBM, Symantec, Trustwave, Microsoft, etc.) have whitepapers and tutorials on certificate lifecycle management for large organizations, but they're usually tied to the specific certificate/PKI management product they're selling.

I suggest getting a basic understanding of how SSL works (how asymmetric encryption works, what is SSL/TLS designed to protect against, the architecture of PKI), then from there narrow it down to the specific application and usage scenario you're interested in and what solutions are available for it. Then you can just study the manuals and tutorials about those specific products, like:


OpenSSL
HEPKI-TAG
Dogtag
OpenCA PKI
libPKI
EJBCA
NSS


And you'll have a much easier time finding detailed information from beginner to advanced.

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@Si4351233

This is a pretty good slideshare on what SSL is by GlobalSign www.slideshare.net/GlobalSign/beginners-guide-to-ssl-v10
Sans has SSL and TLS: A Beginners Guide which also includes diagrams of networks to show how SSL's handshake works between computers www.sans.org/reading_room/whitepapers/protocols/ssl-tls-beginners-guide_1029
I don't think you'll find an all in one book that covers the basics and goes into details. But after reading these beginner articles you may want to look into last years SSL hack
www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/20/hackers-break-ssl-encrypt_n_971510.html
A lot of articles discuss how the SSL servers were affected and how that in turn affected browsers

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@Jamie184

You might want to take a look at my book, "Implementing SSL/TLS Using Cryptography and PKI" (I'm not sure what the rule on linking is here, but if you just paste the title into an Amazon search, it will come up). It's extremely detailed; it's targeted at programmers who are actually implementing SSL (and includes a completely worked out implementation in C, crypto, certificate parsing, and all).

You might also want to read over: commandlinefanatic.com/cgi-bin/showarticle.cgi?article=art012 It's shorter than the book (obviously), but I find that the details of exactly how digital signatures work within certificates is a big help in diagnosing problems.

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