Amazon's New Encryption Protocol

  Amazon aims to remain a major player in Internet circles, and this new venture into Internet security demonstrates that with certainty. Securing Internet traffic has always been a chief concern for Internet users, especially those who serve data. Whereas Internet security is clearly an ever-evolving challenge it makes clear sense to ensure that protocols used to secure information also evolve. Most people have heard of the term SSL and some maybe even know what TLS is but Amazon's new encryption protocol is known as s2n which is a very new term and a new endeavor for Amazon. So what does this all mean?

  SSL (or Open SSL) stands for Secure Sockets Layer and was initially developed by Netscape whose Navigator browser was the first to implement https urls. That was in 1994 - 1996 when the 'Net was still young. TLS (Transport Layer Security) came about several years later and in its newest form is still in use at this time. Since recent hacks involving encryption (or cryptographic) protocol exploits such as Heartbleed and Poodle, Amazon has taken it upon itself to create a new Open Source implementation of the newest TLS protocol. Amazon's s2n may or may not be ground-breaking depending on just how well it protects data once deployed but it does show Amazon's intent to pursue the evolution of Internet security.

  SSL and TLS have been around for some time really so s2n has some shoes to fill. "Signal to Noise" is what Internet encryption attempts to achieve by scrambling the data meant for you and me into nonsense and that is what s2n stands for. Anyone intercepting that data gets noise. Beyond all of this, according to Amazon's AWS security blog s2n uses far less code and aims to be sleek. As a library used in conjunction with TLS the intent is evidently to make Open SSL, TLS, and overall encryption better.

  Read more about Open SSL and TLS, and check out the AWS Security Blog.