The Illustrated TLS Connection

Published at https://tls13.xargs.org

• site/: page source for the finished product
• server/main.c: server code
• client/main.c: client code
• archive/: previous version of this site, which was based on a pre-production BoringSSL patch
• openssl/: patch of OpenSSL that removes any random aspects of the documented connection
• captures/: PCAP and keylog files

See also https://github.com/syncsynchalt/illustrated-tls for a TLS 1.2 version of this project.

Build instructions

If you'd like a working example that reproduces the exact handshake documented on the site:

git clone https://github.com/syncsynchalt/illustrated-tls13.git
cd illustrated-tls13/
cd openssl/
make
cd ../server/
make
cd ../client/
make

Then open two terminals and run ./server in the server/ subdir and ./client in the client/ subdir.

This has been shown to work on MacOS 10.14 and various Linuxes and only has a few easy-to-find dependencies: gcc or clang, golang, cmake, make, patch.