HTTP AND HTTPS: WHAT DO THEY DO, AND HOW ARE THEY DIFFERENT?

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.