Does private key is required on web server during SSL communication? I\'ve read:
In SSL, each party calculates the secret key individually using random
Yes, the private key is required during the SSL handshake as it is used to prove that the server is indeed the owner of the Public Key of the deployed certificate.
But the Public/Private key pair are not used for encryption of the application messages. They are used only in the handshake which creates in the process a shared key by cryptographic parameters transmitted to the client in order to calculate it and used for the symmetric encryption of data after the handshake completes succesfully.