The Secure Socket API: How to Make Secure Sockets with as little as one line of code SSL/TLS libraries are notoriously hard for developers to use, leaving system administrators at the mercy of buggy and vulnerable applications. We demonstrate a new API we have developed, which modifies the standard POSIX socket API to vastly simplify how a developer interacts with TLS, while also giving administrators the ability to control applications and tailor TLS configuration to their needs. We first assess OpenSSL and its uses in open source software, recommending how this functionality should be accommodated within the POSIX API. We then demonstrate the Secure Socket API (SSA), a minimalist TLS API built using existing network functions and show how it can be employed by existing network applications by modifications requiring as little as one line of code. We next describe our SSA implementation that leverages network system calls to provide privilege separation and support for other programming languages. We end with a discussion of the benefits and limitations of the SSA and our accompanying implementation, describing the status of our implementation and ongoing efforts to improve it.