The First Few Milliseconds of an HTTPS Connection (2009)

In addition to this, with SPDY around, these first milliseconds are becoming even more important. Since SPDY requires some sort of negotiation between server and client to agree they both support the protocol, this creates a problem for the first request: how do you know a server supports SPDY without having seen a response from said server? Note that the regular HTTP Accept negotiation is not enough since the browser should already pipeline multiple requests before having seen a response…

This is a fine article. Unfortunately, it describes very specifically how not to verify an PKCS RSA signature, perpetuating a mistake that screwed over browser vendors a couple years back: http://www.matasano.com/log/558/public-key-signature-forgery... To wit: you verify specifically cannot look at the SHA-1 hash at the end of an RSA block and compare it to your own hash, because there are hundreds of zillions of other RSA blocks that can result from the RSA algorithm that could contain a SHA-1 block of…

Please note that this is from 2009 and a lot of things have changed. If you read it consider it a history lesson of how TLS was in 2009, not how it is today.

This makes a lot of sense right now, especially that the next major version of Chrome will mark HTTP websites as invalid