Private Communications Technology
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Internet Security Protocols |
|
Key Management Application Layer S/MIME PGP Sender-ID DKIM SPF PEM* MOSS* Transport Layer Signalling Layer Network Layer |
Private Communications Technology (PCT) 1.0 was a protocol developed by Microsoft in the mid-1990s. PCT was designed to address security flaws in version 2.0 of Netscape's Secure Sockets Layer protocol and to force Netscape to hand change control of the then proprietary SSL protocol to an open standards body.
PCT has since been superseded by SSLv3 and Transport Layer Security. For a while it was still supported by Internet Explorer, but the latest versions have removed it. It is still found in IIS and in the Windows operating system libraries, although in Windows Server 2003 it is disabled by default.
Due to its near disuse, it is arguably a security risk, in particular because, being rarely used, it has received less attention in testing than commonly used protocols, and there is little incentive for Microsoft to expend effort on maintaining its implementation of it. In particular, one security vulnerability is [1].
