Java in a Nutshell, 5th Edition

Name

Package javax.net.ssl

Synopsis

This package defines an API for secure network sockets using the SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) protocol, or the closely related TLS (Transport Layer Security) protocol. It defines the SSLSocket and SSLServerSocket subclasses of the java.net socket and server socket classes. And it defines SSLSocketFactory and SSLServerSocketFactory subclasses of the javax.net factory classes to create those SSL-enabled sockets and server sockets. Clients that want to perform simple SSL-enabled networking can create an SSLSocket with code like the following:

SSLSocketFactory factory = SSLSocketFactory.getDefault( );
SSLSocket securesock = (SSLSocket)factory.getSocket(hostname,
                                                    443);     // https port

Once an SSLSocket has been created, it can be used just like a normal java.net.Socket. Once a connection is established over an SSLSocket, you can use the getSession( ) method to obtain an SSLSession object that provides information about the connection. Note that despite the name of this package and of its key classes, it supports the TLS protocol in addition to the SSL. (The default provider in Sun’s implementation supports SSL 3.0 and TLS 1.0.) The TLS protocol is closely related to SSL, and we’ll simply use the term SSL here.

The SSLSocket class allows you to do arbitrary networking with an SSL-enabled peer. The most common use of SSL today is with the https: protocol on the web. The addition of this package to the core Java platform enables support for https: URLs in ...