TLS/SSL Heartbeat Guidelines

Some applications use the TLS heartbeat extension to the Transport Layer Security (TLS) and Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS) protocols defined by RFC6520. TLS heartbeat provides a way to confirm the connection is still alive—either the client or server sends a specified number of bytes of data and requests the other party echo the response. If this is successful, encrypted data is sent.

You can configure a Max Heartbeat Length in a Network Analysis Policy (NAP) to determine how to handle TLS heartbeats. For more information, see The SSL Preprocessor.

For more information, see About TLS Heartbeat.