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