You have probably visited websites of online merchants before and noticed the word HTTPS in front of the website address. Then most people wonder what that is all about and whether their sensitive information is safe. You can rest assured that if you see HTTPS in front of website address – your information is perfectly safe. HTTPS websites have higher level of protection, so nobody can steal your credit card or other important personal information. The difference between HTTP and HTTPS becomes quite clear when we use their full name. HTTP stands for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol and HTTPS is Hyper Text Transfer Protocol SECURE. You can find an example of a website using HTTPS by going to KikGirls.com. When using HTTPS, addresses have a code that protect the website from unauthorized access and hacking, so your information is always kept private and secure.
How Does HTTP and HTTPS Work
In the first years of Internet, network administrators used the HTTP procedure as a way of exchanging different information that was put online. When everybody learned how the information is exchanged, hacking became quite common and many websites were subject to it because they became vulnerable. Then the administrators started looking for other better solutions by which the information would be protected. The protection procedure relies on so-called SSL Certificate which is being used for encrypting the online data. Encryption is the process when recipient and sender of online information agree on specific ‘code’ that changes their sensitive information, documents and other important things into random, unspecified characters. This encryption procedure for masking, protecting and exchanging information is called Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure or HTTPS.
What makes HTTPS protocol so powerful is that if anyone manages to hack the information that is being transferred between the sender and the recipient, they could not understand anything because all they would see is just a string of unrelated characters that will not make any sense. The only two parties that can see the proper and clear information would be the sender and the recipient. Of course, people can encode their information by themselves, but computers can encode them in much better and faster way. Computers do this by using the SSL Certificate which contains the randomized set of characters that serve as keys to mask the information. These SSL certificates have the public key of the owner of the computer, and the owner can share his public key with any person that needs that key. Internet users need the SSL certificate`s public key so they can encrypt the messages that are sent to the computer owner. Public keys are always shared, but the private key is never shared with anyone.
A couple of other things to know is that security system in place when transferring information is called SSL, which stands for Secure Sockets Layer, and TLS, which is Transport Layer Security. The process of exchanging public online keys through SSL Certificate for enabling HTTPS is known as Public Key Infrastructure. Hopefully you will find this information useful when going online and visiting websites.