That means there are many different opportunities for something to go wrong and cause a handshake failure, or even lead to the “ your connection is not private” error, causing visitors to leave. Plus, there are a lot of moving parts involved in the process. This can pose a significant security risk.

To make a long story short, without the SSL handshake, a secure connection won’t be made. The computer then generates a key and encrypts it, using the public key sent from the server. After the request is sent, the server sends a public key to your computer and checks that key against a list of certificates. Let us explain: the client (typically the browser) sends a request for a secure connection to the server. To authenticate and establish the connection, the user’s browser and the website’s server must go through a series of checks (the handshake), which establish the HTTPS connection parameters. With that out of the way, an SSL handshake is the first step in the process of establishing an HTTPS connection. The terms are often used interchangeably, so for simplicity’s sake, we’ll use “SSL” to refer to both. We won’t get too in-depth about the difference between TLS vs SSL since it’s a minor one. SSL certificates are needed in order to secure your website using HTTPS. Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS) are protocols used to authenticate data transfers between servers and external systems such as browsers. Before we dig deeper into what causes a TLS or SSL handshake failure, it’s helpful to understand what the TLS/SSL handshake is.

Openssl error 20