SSL Accelerator vs SSL Decryptor Explained for the Security+ Exam
Two devices that both terminate TLS, sit in similar places on the network, and are routinely confused. The names sound related. The purposes are not. An SSL/TLS accelerator exists to make your servers faster. An SSL decryptor exists to let your security tools see inside encrypted traffic. One serves performance, the other visibility. A note on naming before going further: SSL has been deprecated for years and everything current uses TLS, but the industry still says "SSL" in product names and job descriptions. CompTIA follows the same convention. Read "SSL" as "TLS" throughout. SSL/TLS Accelerator Establishing a TLS session is computationally expensive. The handshake involves asymmetric cryptography — an RSA or ECDHE key exchange — which is far more demanding than the symmetric encryption that follows. A busy web server can spend a large share of its CPU doing handshakes rather than serving content. An accelerator moves that work off the server. I...