HTTP vs. HTTPS: A Complete Comparison

Wondering about the differences between HTTP and HTTPS on your websites? As an experienced infrastructure engineer, I often get asked by clients about implementing encryption and security protocols.

In this comprehensive guide, I‘ll equip you with insider knowledge on these two protocols, including full technical breakdowns, recommendations, and answers to FAQs. You‘ll come away with clarity on when and why to implement HTTP vs HTTPS.

First, let‘s briefly define what each protocol is all about.

HTTP and HTTPS Defined

HTTP stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol – it‘s a foundational networking protocol that defines how web browsers and servers communicate. When you enter a website URL in your browser, an HTTP request gets sent to the associated server to retrieve the desired content.

HTTPS applies a critical encryption layer known as SSL/TLS (Secure Sockets Layer and Transport Layer Security) to encrypt the communication between browser and server. This prevents snooping or manipulation of traffic sent over the open internet.

The main difference: HTTP sends data openly, while HTTPS encrypts data to provide secure communication.

Now let‘s unpack the history and technical details…

Brief History of HTTP and HTTPS

Tim Berners-Lee first created HTTP networking protocols in 1989 while working at CERN. The goal was to establish a way for researchers to share information seamlessly between computers.

As the World Wide Web expanded exponentially in the 1990s, it became clear that encryption was needed. Netscape introduced SSL encryption in 1994 to work alongside standard HTTP, creating a way to secure website connections – this combination became known as HTTPS.

Over time, HTTPS was publicly adopted across major browsers and websites as online commerce and sensitive user data made encryption non-negotiable. By 2022, over 80% of websites leverage HTTPS by default, and that number continues rising.

How HTTP Communication Works

Under the hood, HTTP works on a simple request-response model. Let‘s walk through what happens step-by-step when you try to access a website:

1. Your web browser (client) initiates a connection request to the destination website server to retrieve a specific page or resource. This request gets sent via established TCP/IP connections.

2. The server receives the HTTP request, processes it, and finds the desired content.

3. An HTTP response gets sent back containing the requested page content for the browser to display.

4. Once resources are loaded, the connection closes or can remain open for additional bidirectional communication.

By default, HTTP traffic gets transmitted openly without encryption using default TCP port 80. While very simple to establish, this also means HTTP communication is not protected from eavesdropping or manipulation attacks once it leaves your machine to cross the internet.

Let‘s contrast this against secure HTTPS processes…

How HTTPS Communication Works

The primary mechanism that distinguishes HTTP vs HTTPS is that all traffic gets fully encrypted using Transport Layer Security (TLS) encryption with HTTPS.

TLS uses extremely robust cryptography requiring both a private and public encryption key to secure sensitive data. Here is how it works at a high level:

1. Your browser requests a secure HTTPS connection to a web server

2. The server then sends back its SSL certificate containing:

   • The public key
   • Signature tying it to a trusted Certificate Authority
   • Domain validation

3. Your browser checks this certificate against a list of trusted CAs to authenticate the server‘s identity and make sure the domain matches. This prevents spoofing.

4. An encrypted handshake then occurs involving the trading of symmetric keys to establish a unique encryption algorithm and keys for the session.

5. The symmetric key encryption transmits requests & data securely between your browser and server, safe from eavesdropping.

6. Session keys expire to keep connections secure against brute force techniques.

Adding TLS encryption has crucial advantages but comes at a marginal cost for computers needing to encrypt/decrypt packets. We‘ll analyze the key differences next…

HTTP vs HTTPS: Key Differences Analyzed

As you can see in the table, HTTPS adds substantial security, integrity, and authentication – with a bit slower page loads being the main downside. However, for websites handling any kind of private user data or financial transactions, the security is non-negotiable.

That covers the key theoretical differences at a protocol level. But how do these differences actually play out from a real-world perspective between HTTP vs HTTPS?

Real-World Differences: HTTP vs HTTPS

Beyond just architectures and data flows, there are tangible impacts to end users, website owners, and security experts when evaluating plaintext HTTP against encrypted HTTPS.

Encryption Algorithms Powering HTTPS

There are a variety of cryptographic cipher suites that HTTPS leverages behind the scenes to encrypt traffic using symmetric/asymmetric algorithms and keys:

Symmetric key encryption uses a shared private key for both encryption and decryption. Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) with key lengths of 128-bits and 256-bits are the most universally supported suites across browsers now. AES scrambles plaintext data into complete gibberish through substitution and permutation methods nearly impossible to break.

Asymmetric encryption uses connected public and private keypair – data encrypted by the public key can only be decrypted by the private counterpart. I‘ll skip the complex math but techniques like RSA and Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman drive HTTPS handshakes securely.

Hash functions like SHA256 or SHA512 condense traffic into unique fixed-length digests detecting any changes to underlying data if hashes don‘t match.

Combined, these cryptographic standards power end-to-end security.

Real-World Attacks Against HTTP Traffic

While the encryption details may seem abstract, seeing real-world attacks in action better demonstrates the dangers of transmitting sensitive data over HTTP.

Tools like Firesheep (now discontinued) could sniff WiFi traffic to hijack unprotected HTTP cookies and login sessions for major sites like Facebook and Twitter. Session sidejacking exposes how easy it is to impersonate logged in users on insecure networks just by monitoring traffic.

Man-in-the-middle attacks take this a level further – attackers can secretly intercept even HTTPS encrypted traffic if they trick users into accepting invalid certificates. Lucrative bank account drainage, healthcare record theft, and ransomware campaigns all leverage these techniques that are preventable with disciplined cybersecurity awareness.

Unfortunately, the average end user faces difficulty grasping these threats among the abstraction of data flows pinging everywhere. That‘s why IT experts push HTTPS usage knowing how dramatically we reduce attack surfaces.

How Website Owners Are Impacted

For website operators, leveraging HTTPS involves purchasing an SSL certificate and handling encryption processes programmatically:

• Certificates involve validation and annual fees but letsencrypt.org offers free ones
• Sites must run TLS handshakes and key exchanges on web/database servers and CDNs
• Cipher suites must get regularly updated as cryptographic standards evolve
• Mixed content errors will occur if HTTP resources get loaded into HTTPS pages

DevOps and hosting platforms reduce this complexity hosting HTTPS by default. Overall there is very minimal lift for most websites to enable HTTPS protocols.

In exchange they gain branding benefits of the padlock icon, higher search engine rankings, industry compliance, and customer trust. For handling user logins, ecommerce, or form data HTTPS adoption should be mandatory regardless of any additional effort.

Google Using HTTPS as Ranking Signal

Perhaps the biggest incentive websites have for migrating beyond protocol mechanics is that Google boosts search rankings for sites using HTTPS encryption. They view it as a strong signal of credibility and commitment to security – key factors in rating quality sites.

Their 2014 announcement lit a fire under brands to upgrade sites as traffic losses from lower SEO could have crushing business impacts. Adoption of HTTPS rapidly accelerated as a result across the web.

Recommendations for HTTPS Migration

Hopefully by this point the benefits of encrypted HTTPS are clear regardless of any marginal speed/cost differences from HTTP. Here is my checklist for teams planning an HTTP to HTTPS migration:

1. Purchase an SSL certificate like those offered by Digicert, Comodo, Globalsign and install it your systems. Let‘s Encrypt offers free certificates.

2. Force HTTPS redirection using .htaccess rules – this prevents slip ups losing encryption on pages.

3. Set the Strict-Transport-Security header enabling HSTS as an added safeguard.

4. Use relative pathing in links and canonical tags so URL migrations don‘t break internal links.

5. Update sitemaps and start 301 redirects for old HTTP pages to maintain SEO.

I offer team training workshops around holistic encryption best practices – encryption is just one key control among multifactor authentication (MFA), network security, key management and more.

Revisit policies frequently as technologies evolve – for example the SHA-1 hash is being deprecated in favor of stronger SHA-2 algorithms after researchers cracked it.

Cybersecurity requires vigilance learning from incidents at major brands like LinkedIn, LastPass, and GitHub suffering breaches from outdated hashing.

Looking Ahead: The Future of HTTP vs HTTPS

Given the clear security and integrity advantages of encrypted HTTPS traffic, it will continue expanding as the default for websites:

Expect over 90% of sites to operate on HTTPS by 2025 given the current growth trajectory. Google and other browsers are accelerating this shift by marking HTTP-only sites as insecure during traffic exchanges.

While HTTPS involves marginally slower page loads under load testing, the difference is negligible for real users in practice while huge attack surface reduction is achieved.

HTTP-only usage will get phased out aside from temporary local connections or experimentation. Feature policy browser controls can also restrict insecure behaviors.

For website owners, my recommendation is to migrate existing properties fully to HTTPS and mandate it by policy for any new apps or services exposing web traffic. The minimal effort pays dividends in trust and security.

Key Takeaways: HTTP vs HTTPS

Let‘s recap the key takeaways around Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) vs. HTTP Secure (HTTPS):

• HTTP sends data openly while HTTPS encrypts communications using TLS/SSL to prevent snooping attacks.
• Encryption comes at a slight cost to speed and complexity, though the impact is minimal.
• Any website handling user logins, financial data or personal info should use HTTPS by default for security.
• Migrating to HTTPS strengthens brand credibility and trust by securing traffic with encryption certificates.

Hopefully this guide has improved your understanding around the need for encryption protocols across the web. Please don‘t hesitate to reach out with any other questions!