Microsoft provides Private Communications Technology (PCT). While PCT is compatible with Secured Socket Layers (SSL), it differs from SSL because it has an improved handshake phase that eliminates a number of bugs currently found in the original SSL. Most people refer to secure PCT channels as SSL for simplicity.
Active Server Pages technology provides tools to help integrate your site with SSL. SSL takes care of the details of finding out which user a particular Web client is, while ASP allows you determine what to do with them. Therefore, once SSL is installed and configured, all communications between your Web site and the Web client will be encrypted and completely confidential. This assumes that your client is connecting via SSL and using the HTTPS identifier in their URL, as shown here:
HTTPS://myserver/myapp/somepage.asp
Accessing information about the Web client occurs through the ASP Request object. You can examine the information about the Web client and determine if they will be granted access to pages. This provides an alternate method of authenticating a user independent of normal Windows NT security.
Note In order to offer secured communications using SSL, you need to request a digital certificate from a certificate authority (such as VeriSign at http://www.verisign.com), install the certificate on your server, and then enable SSL client authentication on your Web directory.