It's official: TLS 1.3 approved as standard

An overhaul of a critical internet security protocol has been completed, with TLS 1.3 becoming an official standard late last week.

Describing it as "a major revision designed for the modern Internet," the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) noted that the update contains "major improvements in the areas of security, performance, and privacy."

One of the biggest is that it will make it much harder for eavesdroppers to decrypt intercepted traffic. The mass surveillance of internet communications by the US National Security Agency (NSA) revealed in 2013 by Edward Snowden, was a major driver in the design of the new protocol. Work on 1.3 began in April 2014 and reached draft 28 before finally being approved in March this year. The protocol is so central to the encryption of internet traffic that it has taken until August 10 for engineers to check that nothing in it is going to cause any major problems.