In recent years, protocols have been developed to ensure secure communications over the Internet, e.g., the secure sockets layer (SSL) and secure electronic transaction (SET). Deployment of these protocols incurs additional resource requirements at the client and server. This may have a negative impact on system performance. In this paper, we consider a scenario where users request information pages stored on a web server, and some of the requests require secure communication. An analytic model is developed to study the performance of a web server based on SSL. In our model, the details of the client-server interactions found in a typical SSL session are represented explicitly. Input parameters to this model are obtained by measuring an existing SSL implementation. Numerical examples on the performance characteristics of SSL are presented.