A network-based appliance includes a mechanism to provide TLS inspection with session resumption, but without requiring that a session cache be maintained. To this end, the inspector is configured to cause the TLS client to participate in maintaining the session context, in effect on behalf of the TLS inspector. In operation, when the inspector first receives the session ticket from the TLS server, and in lieu of caching it, the inspector generates and issues to the client a composited ticket that includes the original ticket and session context information that contains the session key. The composited ticket is encrypted by the inspector to secure the session information. When the TLS client presents the composited session ticket to resume the TLS connection, the inspector decrypts the ticket and retrieves the session context from it directly. The inspector then uses the original session ticket to resume the TLS session.