

#Qupzilla sni how to#
Web browsers know how to trust HTTPS websites based on certificate authorities that come pre-installed in their software. This ensures reasonable protection from eavesdroppers and man-in-the-middle attacks, provided that adequate cipher suites are used and that the server certificate is verified and trusted. The main idea of HTTPS is to create a secure channel over an insecure network. This is the case with HTTP transactions over the Internet, where typically only the server is authenticated (by the client examining the server's certificate).

SSL is especially suited for HTTP since it can provide some protection even if only one side of the communication is authenticated.

However, HTTPS signals the browser to use an added encryption layer of SSL/TLS to protect the traffic. HTTPS is a URI scheme which has identical syntax to the standard HTTP scheme, aside from its scheme token. HTTPS should not be confused with the little-used Secure HTTP (S-HTTP) specified in RFC 2660.įor more details on this topic, see Transport Layer Security. It is recommended to use HTTP Strict Transport Security with HTTPS to protect users from man-in-the-middle attacks. Deploying HTTPS also allows the use of SPDY, which is designed to reduce page load times and latency. This isn't true deploying HTTPS requires no additional equipment or special hardware. Ī common misconception is that HTTPS is performance heavy and cannot be deployed on existing equipment. Similarly, cookies on a site served through HTTPS have to have the secure attribute enabled. This is one reason why EFF and Torproject started the development of HTTPS Everywhere, which is included in the Tor Browser Bundle.Ī site must be completely hosted over HTTPS, without having some of its contents loaded over HTTP or the user will be vulnerable to some attacks and surveillance. Another example where HTTPS is important is connections over Tor (anonymity network), as malicious Tor nodes can damage or alter the contents passing through them in an insecure fashion and inject malware into the connection. HTTPS is especially important over unencrypted Wi-fi as it is completely insecure by design and attacks on unencrypted Wi-fi networks are relatively common. In the late 2000s and early 2010s, HTTPS began to see widespread use for protecting page authenticity on all types of websites, securing accounts and keeping user communications, identity and web browsing private. Historically, HTTPS connections were primarily used for payment transactions on the World Wide Web, e-mail and for sensitive transactions in corporate information systems. In practice this means that eavesdroppers can infer the identity of the server (web site) that one is communicating with as well as the amount and duration of the communication, though not the content of the communication. However, because host addresses and port numbers are necessarily part of the underlying TCP/IP protocols, HTTPS cannot protect their disclosure. This includes the request URL (which particular web page which was requested), query parameters, headers, and cookies (which often contain identity information about the user). In practice, this provides a reasonable guarantee that one is communicating with precisely the web site that one intended to communicate with (as opposed to an impostor), as well as ensuring that the contents of communications between the user and site cannot be read or forged by any third party.īecause HTTPS piggybacks HTTP entirely on top of TLS, the entirety of the underlying HTTP protocol is encrypted. Additionally, it provides bidirectional encryption of communications between a client and server, which protects against eavesdropping and tampering with and/or forging the contents of the communication. In its popular deployment on the internet, HTTPS provides authentication of the web site and associated web server that one is communicating with, which protects against Man-in-the-middle attacks. Technically, it is not a protocol in itself rather, it is the result of simply layering the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) on top of the SSL/TLS protocol, thus adding the security capabilities of SSL/TLS to standard HTTP communications. Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure ( HTTPS) is a widely-used communications protocol for secure communication over a computer network, with especially wide deployment on the Internet. Please help improve this article to make it understandable to non-experts, without removing the technical details. This article may be too technical for most readers to understand.
