Linux

HTTP AND HTTPS ,what’s the difference .

Introduction

So This is your normal Monday morning at office and you have switched on your computer and opened

your web browser typed your regular website and …wait have you noticed something….

A the upper left corner of your URL bar glowing with a text saying https:// and glowing green indicating

a secure connection. What happened to it!

Interchange information over internet or World Wide Web (WWW) follows a request response

procedure. First Browser sends request to access resource located in the server then server understands

the request and make available those resources to client.

 

The process seems simple at first sight browser request for something and server response with that

resource available, but things goes different in other side.

In the beginning, network administrators had to figure out how to share the information they put out on

the Internet. Once everyone knew how to exchange information, intercepting on the Internet was not

difficult. So knowledgeable administrators agreed upon a procedure to protect the information they

exchanged and called it Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). The protection relies on SSL Certificate to

encrypt the online data. Encryption means that the sender and recipient agree upon a “code” and

translate their documents into random-looking character strings.

HTTP

HTTP it stands for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol and is a networking protocol used allow World Wide

Web users to transferring information like image, text, video, music, graphic and other files on web

pages. HTTP is basically used to access html pages and also other resources can be accessible using

HTTP.

HTTPS

HTTPS stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure. HTTPS was developed by Netscape Corporation to

allow authorization and secured transactions. HTTPS is a protocol which uses an encrypted HTTP

connection by transport-layer security. The procedure for encrypting information and then exchanging it

is called Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS).Sometimes, the clients may be exchanging private

information with a server, which needs to be secured for preventing some hacking issue

With HTTPS if anyone in between the sender and the recipient could open the message, they still could

not understand it.To do this, the computer at each end uses a document called an “SSL Certificate”

containing character strings that are the keys to their secret “codes.” The owner shares the public key

with anyone who needs it. Other users need the public key to encrypt messages to the owner. The

owner sends those users the SSL certificate, which contains the public key. The security during the

transfer is called the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS).The procedure for

exchanging public keys using SSL Certificate to enable HTTPS, SSL and TLS is called Public Key

Infrastructure (PKI).

Difference

HTTP HTTPS

URL begins with “http://” URL begins with “https://”

It uses port 80 for communication It uses port 443 for communication

Unsecured Secured

Operates at Application Layer Operates at Transport Layer

No encryption Encryption is present

No certificates required Certificates required

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