Benefits and Adoption Rate of TLS 1.3

The cybersecurity industry is often reluctant to adopt new technologies due to perceived complications, assumed dependencies, and unclear information about the benefits. Digital communication protections are not exempt from this phenomenon and are often overlooked when maintaining a secure environment. Adopting new technologies is essential to utilize recent advancements in speed, security, and other newly available features. RFC 8446, better known as TLS 1.3, was released in August of 2018 and included enhancements to the speed and security of a TLS session. Older versions of TLS that still exist, however, fall short when compared to TLS 1.3. This paper provides data testing the speed and security of TLS 1.3 compared to TLS 1.2 across major TLS libraries and a point-in-time measurement of TLS 1.3 adoption across the top 500 websites in the business, retail, technology, and news sectors.