2. Goals
The goals of TLS Protocol, in order of their priority, are:
- Cryptographic security: TLS should be used to establish a secure connection between two parties.
- Interoperability: Independent programmers should be able to develop applications utilizing TLS that will then be able to successfully exchange cryptographic parameters without knowledge of one another's code.
- Extensibility: TLS seeks to provide a framework into which new public key and bulk encryption methods can be incorporated as necessary. This will also accomplish two sub-goals: to prevent the need to create a new protocol (and risking the introduction of possible new weaknesses) and to avoid the need to implement an entire new security library.
- Relative efficiency: Cryptographic operations tend to be highly CPU intensive, particularly public key operations. For this reason, the TLS protocol has incorporated an optional session caching scheme to reduce the number of connections that need to be established from scratch. Additionally, care has been taken to reduce network activity.