This paper is about the secure protocol of communication SSL (Secure Socket Layer). Netscape has proposed version 3.0 of SSL as a standard for private communications and it's currently under ITEF view for being approved.
The approach we used is bottom-up type, we start from the analysis of the algorithms at the base of the protocol and we build a solid framework up to the higher levels.
This organization seemed the most obivious to us for if we want to understand how data exchange happens at the levels above it's required to analyze the algorithms at the levels below which are the most critical and important part of the protocol itself.
Once we acquired some experience about the protocol we decided to use a freeware library in order to implement a trivial data exchange between a client and a server just to give a practical demostration of what SSL can do.


A Word 7.0 version of the paper (in italian) is available here