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Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) is a combination of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) with the SSL/TLS protocol. It provides encrypted communication to prevent eavesdropping and to securely identify the web server with which you are actually communicating. Historically, HTTPS connections were primarily used for payment transactions on the World Wide Web, e-mail and for sensitive transactions in corporate information systems. In the late 2000s and early 2010s, HTTPS began to see widespread use for protecting page authenticity on all types of websites, securing accounts and keeping user communications, identity and browsing history private.

While connecting to a website, HTTPS makes it possible to know whether you are talking to the right server and protects from passive and active network attacks such as Man-in-the-middle attacks. During a session it can protect against eavesdropping and tampering with the contents of the site or with the information you send to the site.^[1] As an example HTTPS can protect from an adversary replacing downloadable content on a site with malware.

HTTPS is especially important over unencrypted Wi-fi as it is completely insecure by design and attacks on unencrypted Wi-fi networks are relatively common. Another example where HTTPS is important is connections over Tor (anonymity network), as malicious Tor nodes can damage or alter the contents passing through them in an insecure fashion and inject malware into the connection. This is one reason why EFF and Torproject started the development of HTTPS Everywhere, which is included in the Tor Browser Bundle.

Note that when a client sends an HTTPS request, the entire request is encrypted, including the URL. However the hostname and port of the URL are visible to an eavesdropper because this information is also present in the TCP/IP packets to establish and maintain the connection. This means that an eavesdropper can see the sites you connect to, the amount of time you spend using a site, and the amount of information you upload or download on the particular site. ^[1] However, the entire HTTPS request, including the URL path and query parameters, can only be decrypted by the destination site or by an interposing intermediary that terminates the HTTPS connection on behalf of the site.

A site must be completely hosted over HTTPS, without having some of its contents loaded over HTTP or the user will be vulnerable to some attacks and surveillance.^[1]

HTTPS should not be confused with the little-used Secure HTTP (S-HTTP) specified in RFC 2660.

Overview[link]

HTTPS is a URI scheme which has identical syntax to the standard HTTP scheme, aside from its scheme token. However, HTTPS signals the browser to use an added encryption layer of SSL/TLS to protect the traffic. SSL is especially suited for HTTP since it can provide some protection even if only one side of the communication is authenticated. This is the case with HTTP transactions over the Internet, where typically only the server is authenticated (by the client examining the server's certificate).

The main idea of HTTPS is to create a secure channel over an insecure network. This ensures reasonable protection from eavesdroppers and man-in-the-middle attacks, provided that adequate cipher suites are used and that the server certificate is verified and trusted.

Web browsers know how to trust HTTPS websites based on certificate authorities that come pre-installed in their software. Certificate authorities (e.g. VeriSign/Microsoft/etc.) are in this way being trusted by web browser creators to provide valid certificates. Logically, it follows that a user should trust an HTTPS connection to a website if and only if all of the following are true:

1. The user trusts that the browser software correctly implements HTTPS with correctly pre-installed certificate authorities.
2. The user trusts the certificate authority to vouch only for legitimate websites.
3. The website provides a valid certificate, which means it was signed by a trusted authority.
4. The certificate correctly identifies the website (e.g., when the browser visits "https://example.com", the received certificate is properly for "Example Inc." and not some other entity).
5. Either the intervening hops on the Internet are trustworthy, or the user trusts that the protocol's encryption layer (TLS/SSL) is sufficiently secure against eavesdroppers.

Browser integration[link]

Most browsers display a warning if they receive an invalid certificate. Older browsers, when connecting to a site with an invalid certificate, would present the user with a dialog box asking if they wanted to continue. Newer browsers display a warning across the entire window. Newer browsers also prominently display the site's security information in the address bar. Extended validation certificates turn the address bar green in newer browsers. Most browsers also display a warning to the user when visiting a site that contains a mixture of encrypted and unencrypted content.

Many web browsers, including Firefox (shown here), use the address bar to tell the user that their connection is secure, often by coloring the background.

Most web browsers alert the user when visiting sites that have invalid security certificates. This example is from Firefox 11 on Ubuntu.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, opining that "In an ideal world, every web request could be defaulted to HTTPS", has provided an add-on called HTTPS Everywhere for Mozilla Firefox that enables HTTPS by default for hundreds of frequently used websites. A beta version of this plugin is also available for Google Chrome and Chromium. ^[2][3]

Technical[link]

Difference from HTTP[link]

HTTPS URLs begin with "https://" and use port 443 by default, whereas HTTP URLs begin with "http://" and use port 80 by default.

HTTP is insecure and is subject to man-in-the-middle and eavesdropping attacks, which can let attackers gain access to website accounts and sensitive information. HTTPS is designed to withstand such attacks and is considered secure against such attacks (with the exception of older deprecated versions of SSL).

Network layers[link]

HTTP operates at the highest layer of the OSI Model, the Application layer; but the security protocol operates at a lower sublayer, encrypting an HTTP message prior to transmission and decrypting a message upon arrival. Strictly speaking, HTTPS is not a separate protocol, but refers to use of ordinary HTTP over an encrypted SSL/TLS connection.

Everything in the HTTPS message is encrypted, including the headers, and the request/response load. With the exception of the possible CCA cryptographic attack described in the limitations section below, the attacker can only know the fact that a connection is taking place between the two parties, already known to him, the domain name and IP addresses.

Server setup[link]

To prepare a web server to accept HTTPS connections, the administrator must create a public key certificate for the web server. This certificate must be signed by a trusted certificate authority for the web browser to accept it without warning. The authority certifies that the certificate holder is the operator of the web server that presents it. Web browsers are generally distributed with a list of signing certificates of major certificate authorities so that they can verify certificates signed by them.

Acquiring certificates[link]

Authoritatively signed certificates may be free^[4][5] or cost between US$8^[6] and $1,500^[7] per year. However, in the case of free certificate authorities such as CACert, popular browsers (e.g. Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer) may not include the trusted root certificates, which may cause untrusted warning messages to be displayed to end users. StartSSL is an example of a service offering free certificates with extensive browser support.

Organizations may also run their own certificate authority, particularly if they are responsible for setting up browsers to access their own sites (for example, sites on a company intranet, or major universities). They can easily add copies of their own signing certificate to the trusted certificates distributed with the browser.

There also exists a peer-to-peer certificate authority, CACert.

Use as access control[link]

The system can also be used for client authentication in order to limit access to a web server to authorized users. To do this, the site administrator typically creates a certificate for each user, a certificate that is loaded into his/her browser. Normally, that contains the name and e-mail address of the authorized user and is automatically checked by the server on each reconnect to verify the user's identity, potentially without even entering a password.

In case of compromised private key[link]

A certificate may be revoked before it expires, for example because the secrecy of the private key has been compromised. Newer versions of popular browsers such as Google Chrome, Firefox,^[8] Opera,^[9] and Internet Explorer on Windows Vista^[10] implement the Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP) to verify that this is not the case. The browser sends the certificate's serial number to the certificate authority or its delegate via OCSP and the authority responds, telling the browser whether or not the certificate is still valid.^[11]

Limitations[link]

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SSL comes in two options, simple and mutual.

The mutual version is more secure, but requires the user to install a personal certificate in their browser in order to authenticate themselves.

Whatever strategy is used (simple or mutual), the level of protection strongly depends on the correctness of the implementation of the web browser and the server software and the actual cryptographic algorithms supported.

SSL does not prevent the entire site from being indexed using a web crawler, and in some cases the URI of the encrypted resource can be inferred by knowing only the intercepted request/response size.^[12] This allows an attacker to have access to the plaintext (the publicly available static content), and the encrypted text (the encrypted version of the static content), permitting a cryptographic attack.

Because SSL operates below HTTP and has no knowledge of higher-level protocols, SSL servers can only strictly present one certificate for a particular IP/port combination.^[13] This means that, in most cases, it is not feasible to use name-based virtual hosting with HTTPS. A solution called Server Name Indication (SNI) exists, which sends the hostname to the server before encrypting the connection, although many older browsers do not support this extension. Support for SNI is available since Firefox 2, Opera 8, Safari 2.1, Google Chrome 6, and Internet Explorer 7 on Windows Vista.^[14][15][16]

From an architectural point of view:

1. An SSL/TLS connection is managed by the first front machine that initiates the SSL connection. If, for any reasons (routing, traffic optimization, etc.), this front machine is not the application server and it has to decipher data, solutions have to be found to propagate user authentication information or certificate to the application server, which needs to know who is going to be connected.
2. For SSL with mutual authentication, the SSL/TLS session is managed by the first server that initiates the connection. In situations where encryption has to be propagated along chained servers, session timeOut management becomes extremely tricky to implement.
3. With mutual SSL/TLS, security is maximal, but on the client-side, there is no way to properly end the SSL connection and disconnect the user except by waiting for the SSL server session to expire or closing all related client applications.
4. For performance reasons, static content that is not specific to the user or transaction, and thus not private, is usually delivered through a non-crypted front server or separate server instance with no SSL. As a consequence, this content is usually not protected. Many browsers warn the user when a page has mixed encrypted and non-encrypted resources.

A sophisticated type of man-in-the-middle attack was presented at the Blackhat Conference 2009. This type of attack defeats the security provided by HTTPS by changing the https: link into an http: link, taking advantage of the fact that few Internet users actually type "https" into their browser interface: they get to a secure site by clicking on a link, and thus are fooled into thinking that they are using HTTPS when in fact they are using HTTP. The attacker then communicates in clear with the client.^[17]

In May, 2010, a research paper^[18] by researchers from Microsoft Research and Indiana University discovered that detailed sensitive user data can be inferred from side channels such as packet sizes. More specifically, the researchers found that an eavesdropper can infer the illnesses/medications/surgeries of the user, her family income and investment secrets, despite HTTPS protection in several high-profile, top-of-the-line web applications in healthcare, taxation, investment and web search.

History[link]

Netscape Communications created HTTPS in 1994 for its Netscape Navigator web browser.^[19] Originally, HTTPS was used with SSL protocol. As SSL evolved into Transport Layer Security (TLS), the current version of HTTPS was formally specified by RFC 2818 in May 2000.

See also[link]

References[link]

External links[link]

• RFC 2818: HTTP Over TLS
• SSL 3.0 Specification (IETF)
• HTTP versus HTTPS, a clear explanation

Allan Schore
Born	February 20, 1943 New York
Nationality	American
Fields	Neuropsychology
Institutions	University of California, Los Angeles
Alma mater	University of Pittsburgh

Allan Schore (born February 20, 1943) is a leading researcher in the field of neuropsychology, whose contributions have influenced the fields of affective neuroscience, neuropsychiatry, trauma theory, developmental psychology, attachment theory, pediatrics, infant mental health, psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, and behavioral biology.

Schore is on the clinical faculty of the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine, and at the UCLA Center for Culture, Brain, and Development. He is author of the seminal volume Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self, now in its 11th printing, and two recent books Affect Dysregulation and Disorders of the Self and Affect Regulation and the Repair of the Self, as well as numerous articles and chapters. Schore is Editor of the acclaimed Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology, and a reviewer or on the editorial staff of 27 journals.

Schore's activities as a clinician-scientist span from his theoretical work on the enduring effect of early trauma on brain development, to neuroimaging research on the neurobiology of attachment and studies of borderline personality disorder, to his biological studies of relational trauma in wild elephants, and to his practice of psychotherapy over the last 4 decades. He leads Study Groups in Developmental Affective Neuroscience & Clinical Practice in Los Angeles, Berkeley, Portland, Seattle, Boulder, Austin and Albuquerque; lectures internationally; and is a member of the Commission on Children at Risk for the Report on Children and Civil Society, "Hardwired to Connect".

Publications[link]

• Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self (originally published 1994) ISBN 0-8058-3459-1
• Affect Dysregulation and Disorders of the Self (WW Norton & Company, 2003).
• Affect Regulation and Repair of the Self (WW Norton & Company, 2003).

External links[link]

• Personal Website