The HTTPS protocol is an extension of HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol) that provides secure communication over the internet. Unlike HTTP, which is insecure by design, HTTPS encrypts the entire communication between your browser and the web server, ensuring privacy and security.
When you request a webpage from a web server, your data goes through multiple trips between the browser and the server. Additionally, depending on the webpage’s content, there may be additional connections required to retrieve CSS files, JavaScript files, images, and more. Unfortunately, during any of these connections, any network your data traverses can inspect and manipulate it.
This poses serious risks, including potential monitoring and logging of all your network activity by third parties without your knowledge. Some networks even inject ads into web pages without your consent. Moreover, you may be vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks, where an attacker can manipulate your data and impersonate your computer on the network. It is remarkably simple for someone to eavesdrop on HTTP packets transmitted over a public and unencrypted Wi-Fi network.
To address these issues, HTTPS ensures that the entire communication between your browser and the web server is encrypted. In today’s internet landscape, privacy and security are paramount concerns. In the past, using an encrypted connection was only necessary for login-protected pages or during e-commerce checkouts due to the complications and costs associated with SSL certificates. However, today, HTTPS is a requirement for any website. More than half of the entire web is now secured with HTTPS. In fact, Google Chrome has started explicitly marking HTTP sites as insecure, compelling website owners to make HTTPS mandatory.
When using HTTP, the default server port is 80, whereas for HTTPS, it is 443. If a server uses the default port, it does not need to be explicitly mentioned. Sometimes, HTTPS is referred to as “HTTP over SSL” or “HTTP over TLS.” The only information that is not encrypted when using HTTPS is the web server domain and server port. All other information, including resource paths, headers, cookies, and query parameters, is encrypted.
While there is some processing overhead introduced by the TLS protocol used in HTTPS, it enables the use of the latest protocol, HTTP/2. HTTP/2 offers significant advantages over HTTP/1.1, such as header compression, resource multiplexing, and server push. With server push, the server can push additional resources when a specific resource is requested. This means that when a browser requests a page, it also receives all the necessary resources (images, CSS, JS) concurrently.
In summary, despite the encryption overhead, HTTPS is not only essential for ensuring privacy and security but also offers improved performance compared to HTTP when paired with a modern setup. This is particularly true because HTTPS enables the use of the faster HTTP/2 protocol.