What is HTTP (HTTPS)?
Hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) is the application (or program) that a web browser uses to ask a web server for information. This is a critical aspect of the digital ecosystem, offering numerous examples and case studies that illustrate its application across different industries and scenarios.
Example
HTTP:
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GET /index.html HTTP/1.1
Host: www.example.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/97.0.4692.71 Safari/537.36
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/avif,image/webp,image/apng,*/*;q=0.8,application/signed-exchange;v=b3;q=0.9
In this example, a client is making an HTTP request to retrieve the “index.html” file from the server at “www.example.com”. The request includes various headers such as “User-Agent” and “Accept”, specifying the client’s preferences and capabilities.
HTTPS:
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GET /index.html HTTP/1.1
Host: www.example.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/97.0.4692.71 Safari/537.36
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/avif,image/webp,image/apng,*/*;q=0.8,application/signed-exchange;v=b3;q=0.9
The HTTPS request is similar to the HTTP request, but the data transmission is encrypted using SSL/TLS (Secure Sockets Layer/Transport Layer Security) to ensure the confidentiality and integrity of the data exchanged between the client and the server. This encryption helps protect sensitive information such as passwords, credit card numbers, and other personal data from being intercepted or tampered with by malicious actors.