The heaviest use of cryptography today is most probably to encrypt communications. After all, cryptography was invented for this purpose. To do this, applications generally do not make use of cryptographic primitives like authenticated encryption directly, but instead use much more involved protocols that abstract the use of the cryptographic primitives. I call these protocols secure transport protocols, for lack of a better term.
In this chapter, you will learn about the most widely used secure transport protocol: the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol. I will also lightly cover other secure transport protocols and how they differ from TLS.