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Comment by colmmacc | Hacker News Reader

Serious question, how did you weigh up taking the "SSL" out of the book title?

I spent a lot of time thinking about that, but, in the end, I don't think anyone could justify the words "bulletproof" and "ssl" next to each other. So that was that. The "SSL" part was in the title chiefly because, colloquially, that's what everyone uses, especially for certificates.

On a positive note, I was able to add "PKI" to the title, which makes sense because the book is actually about PKI as much as it is about TLS. A win-win, I think.

I would definitely have an easier time telling somebody they ought to read a book with "TLS" in the title. I think many conversations I have are already filled with too many parentheticals as it is, and so ducking out to agree that yes, it isn't called SSL any more is just one extra layer on a conversation that might already risk stack overflow.

TLS 1.3 is definitely a good breaking point. If you understood exactly how SSLv3 works, you could read TLS 1.2 and say to yourself OK, this is basically the same protocol except with some fresh paint and with some extra gadgets I needn't care about yet, whereas you just can't do that with TLS 1.3.

I also see you put TLS 1.3 first, and I think that's a good choice, show people the Right Thing™ as we understand it today first, this is not a history lesson.

Agreed. Many modern systems need only TLS 1.3 and nothing older. Unfortunately, TLS 1.3 is saddled with the baggage of backward compatibility. This is not something you might care if you're deploying it, but if you're studying how things work, it's still necessary to understand TLS 1.2 and earlier protocols. There are many places where, in the TLS 1.3 chapter, I had to say something along the lines "this design decision ties to this TLS 1.2 behaviour or problem".

There was actually some discussion on the IETF WG list about changing the name back to SSL when TLS 1.3 was being discussed, because of all the confusion.

I think TLS 4 would have been a good choice, given the massive changes made to the protocol. Fun fact: internally, the protocol version still follows the original SSL numbering scheme. TLS 1.3 is actually SSL 3.4 :)

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