Skip to main content

HTTPS and HTTP Difference

You click to check out at an online merchant. Suddenly your browser address bar saysHTTPS instead of HTTP. What's going on? Is your credit card information safe?
Good news. Your information is safe. The website you are working with has made sure that no one can steal your information.
Instead of HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), this website uses HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure.
Using HTTPS, the computers agree on a "code" between them, and then they scramble the messages using that "code" so that no one in between can read them. This keeps your information safe from hackers.
They use the "code" on a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), sometimes called Transport Layer Security (TLS) to send the information back and forth.

How Does HTTP Work?

In the beginning, network administrators had to figure out how to share the information they put out on the Internet.
They agreed on a procedure for exchanging information and called it HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP).
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. 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.
The procedure for encrypting information and then exchanging it is called HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS).
With HTTPS if anyone in between the sender and the recipient could open the message, they still could not understand it. Only the sender and the recipient, who know the "code," can decipher the message.
Humans could encode their own documents, but computers do it faster and more efficiently. 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."
SSL certificates contain the computer owner's "public key."
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 owner does not share the private key with anyone.
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).

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Ghosting

Ghosting is to cease communications without notification. The use of the word "ghost" as a verb originated in social media in reference to dating, but the term is now used by employers to describe employees and potential employees who suddenly disappear. Typically, ghosting is used to describe: Job candidates who suddenly stop responding to messages. New hires who fail to show up for their first day of work. Employees who do not show up for a shift. Employees who leave work in the middle of the day and never come back. Some analysts blame ghosting on millennial entitlement. The reasoning is that members of the millennial generation have been brought up to feel they are special -- so special, in fact, that they do not need to follow conventional rules of behavior. Other analysts, however, maintain that ghosting behavior stems from changes in the job market and the phenomenon is simply a reflection of the laws of supply and demand in a healthy jo...

Data deduplication

Data deduplication -- often called intelligent compression or single-instance storage -- is a process that eliminates redundant copies of data and reduces storage overhead. Data deduplication techniques ensure that only one unique instance of data is retained on storage media, such as disk, flash or tape. Redundant data blocks are replaced with a pointer to the unique data copy. In that way, data deduplication closely aligns with incremental backup, which copies only the data that has changed since the previous backup. For example, a typical email system might contain 100 instances of the same 1 megabyte (MB) file attachment. If the email platform is backed up or archived, all 100 instances are saved, requiring 100 MB of storage space. With data deduplication, only one instance of the attachment is stored; each subsequent instance is referenced back to the one saved copy. In this example, a 100 MB storage demand drops to 1 MB. Target vs. source deduplication Data deduplica...

A Graphics Processing Unit (GPU)

A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a computer chip that performs rapid mathematical calculations, primarily for the purpose of rendering images. A GPU may be found integrated with a central processing unit (CPU) on the same circuit, on a graphics card or in the motherboard of a personal computer or server. In the early days of computing, the CPU performed these calculations. As more graphics-intensive applications such as AutoCAD were developed; however, their demands put strain on the CPU and degraded performance. GPUs came about as a way to offload those tasks from CPUs, freeing up their processing power. NVIDIA, AMD, Intel and ARM are some of the major players in the GPU market. GPU vs. CPU A graphics processing unit is able to render images more quickly than a central processing unit because of its parallel processing architecture, which allows it to perform multiple calculations at the same time. A single CPU does not have this capability, although multi...