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Discussion on: Brief(ish) explanation of how https works

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Rui Figueiredo

Certificates are used to prove that the website is whom it says it is. The rest of the communication is encrypted using symmetric key encryption.

Diffie-Hellman is not an encryption algorithm though, it's a key exchange algorithm.

Although the article only mentions Diffie-Hellman, there are other options to exchange a secret key.