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Comment by syncsynchalt | Hacker News Reader

Author here - I was going to publish this today but it leaked out ahead of time. Enjoy!

EDIT: I'm putting a CDN in place.

Kudos! This a great work. I remember few years back when I was exploring TLS, there were no such resources and it took many months of trial and error to get some reasonable understanding. I tried doing a similar thing, but was only able to do for couple of packets [0]. Surely such an illustration will go a long way to help newbies to understand a complicated protocol.

[0] https://serializethoughts.com/2014/07/27/dissecting-tls-clie...

Thanks! This is really a fantastic resource. Something like a TLS connection is one of those things that seems really intimidating but when you see it laid out like this it makes you feel like 'I can understand this!'. Great work.

very nice! first thing I noticed is that at https://github.com/syncsynchalt/illustrated-tls/blob/master/... the content and samples are hardcoded into HTML - might it be nice if this was generated from some kind of JSON file or similar such that the approach you have here could be generalized to support any network protocol someone might want to annotate with descriptions?

Yes, if I do this again I will definitely generalize it into a content generator.

(Isn't that what every site turns into eventually, a custom CMS?)

As it is it's all tcpflow, hexdump, and vim.

Great illustration, I am going to share this with the rest of my team. One thing that I would find interesting is how x509 client certificates fit into the negotiation. I know this is optional so I don't know how it would fit into your flow easily though.

Yes, I thought about explaining client certs and others (the first request I got was to add ALPN to the connection), but there's already so much to talk about in even this simple connection that I thought it would detract from the document as a whole by making it even longer and denser.

I didn't even get a chance to explain the (normal, server-side) x509 certificate signing much because it just kept taking over the document. TLS is complex enough that just explaining the happy path is 400kb of HTML.

I did a presentation at our local software meetup on this topic a month ago, and wow, I could have really used this. It's way clearer and more organized than my muddled slides.. :-)

Very nice work !

Can you do this for DTLS, too? :=-)

This is the third request I've gotten for DTLS. Where are you weirdos coming from? :)

A canadian?

Nice.

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