Our whiteboard is a client/server application that uses sockets to communicate with the server. Because we want our communications to be private, we'll be using JSSE secure sockets instead of regular sockets. Secure sockets are used the same way that regular sockets are, except that they transparently encrypt any data that passes through them.

Before we get into how JSSE creates and manages secure connections, we should review how regular, nonsecure connections are initiated and accepted.