Virtual hosting (hosting multiple sites on the same IP address) became possible with HTTP/1.1 because it declares the “Host” header, which specifies which one of the (possibly) multiple sites hosted on the same IP address you would like to reach (a small side-effect is that when you use the IP address of a site, you might get a different site, since the web-server doesn’t know which one to pick).

However this wasn’t possible with SSL, because the certificate was sent before the headers and a certificate is specific for a site (at least the run-of-the mill ones), and the webserver didn’t know which certificate to pick. When I’ve heard on the SANS Daily Stormcast that the newest version of Apache included a way to do this, I was enthusiastic and intrigued at the same time, so I went looking and found the following thing:

• It is done by doing the initial communication in plaintext and then “upgrading” to TLS. I wonder just how much is in plaintext? (see the What’s new document – the mod_ssl section specifically)
• The official RFC for this is RFC 2817. The RFC specifies both methods for upgrading – before and after the actual request – so the devil will be in the details implementation
• There is no browser support for this as of this moment, so it is pretty much useless (until IE + IIS starts supporting it is pretty much a cool option). But at least we have a reference implementation

Bonus article: The First Few Milliseconds of an HTTPS Connection

Picture taken from AMagill’s photostream with permission.