. It also assumes that you have a basic understanding of TCP/IP and sockets.</p>

<h2 id="Creating-the-SSL_CTX-and-SSL-objects">Creating the SSL_CTX and SSL objects</h2>

<p>The first step is to create an <b>SSL_CTX</b> object for our client. We use the <a href="../man3/SSL_CTX_new.html">SSL_CTX_new(3)</a> function for this purpose. We could alternatively use <a href="../man3/SSL_CTX_new_ex.html">SSL_CTX_new_ex(3)</a> if we want to associate the <b>SSL_CTX</b> with a particular <b>OSSL_LIB_CTX</b> (see <a h