Moserware: The First Few Milliseconds of an HTTPS Connection

The First Few Milliseconds of an HTTPS Connection

Convinced from spending hours reading rave reviews, Bob eagerly clicked “Proceed to Checkout" for his gallon of Tuscan Whole Milk and…

Whoa! What just happened?

In the 220 milliseconds that flew by, a lot of interesting stuff happened to make Firefox change the address bar color and put a lock in the lower right corner. With the help of Wireshark, my favorite network tool, and a slightly modified debug build of Firefox, we can see exactly what’s going on.

By agreement of RFC 2818, Firefox knew that “https" meant it should connect to port 443 at Amazon.com: