Learning Network Programming with Java

Security

Security is a complex topic. In this section, we will demonstrate a few simple aspects of this topic, as it relates to networks. Specifically, we will create a secure echo server. Creating a secure echo server is not that much different from the non-secure echo server that we developed earlier. However, there is a lot going on behind the scenes to make it work. We can ignore many of these details for now, but we will delve more deeply into it in Chapter 8, Network Security.

We will be using the SSLServerSocketFactory class to instantiate secure server sockets. In addition, it is necessary to create keys that the underlying SSL mechanism can use to encrypt the communications.

Creating a SSL server

An SSLServerSocket class is declared in ...