HTTPS Vs HTTP: Which One Is More Secure?

Security is an important issue for everyone over the internet. You can increase security if you know about some different type of protocols and connections. So below are the explanations of HTTP and HTTPS along with their merits and demerits. Let's see what they are.

What's HTTP?

This is short for Hypertext Transfer Protocol. It offers a set of standards and rules that governs how the information gets transmitted across the web. It also provides the standard rules for the web servers and web browsers for communication purpose. HTTP is an application layer network protocol that's built on the top of TCP.

It makes use of hypertext text structure that establishes a logical connection between the nodes that contain text. This is also termed as "Stateless protocol" because each and every command's execution is done separately without the use of references of the previous run commands.

What's HTTPS?

This stands for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure. It is a sophisticated, secure and advanced version of the HTTP, relying on the port number 443 for Data Communication. It encrypts the whole communication with SSL, hence secure transaction. It's a combination of HTTP and TLS/SSL protocol.

It allows creating a secure and encrypted connection between browser and server. This offers bi-directional data security. It helps with protecting potentially sensitive info so that it does not get stolen. In the HTTPS protocol, the SSL transactions are negotiated through the key-based encoding algorithms. Generally, this key is 128 or 40 bits in strength.

Merits of HTTP:

• It is easy to implement HTTP with other protocols on the web or other networks.
• It's quick to access HTTP pages as they are stored on internet and computer caches.
• Platform independent allowing porting across platforms.
• It does not require Runtime support.
• It is usable over the Firewalls. Various global applications are now possible.
• This is not oriented to connection. Thus, the network does not provide overhead for creating and maintaining information and session state.

Merits of HTTPS:

• Mostly, HTTP sites redirect to the sites working over HTTPS. Thus, if people type Http:// in the search bar, it will automatically redirect to https through a secured connection.
• Users can perform secure e-commerce transactions, online banking for example.
• SSL technology provides protection to users and also builds trust.
• Certificate owner's identity is verified by an independent authority, meaning every SSL Certificate has unique and authenticated info about the owner.

Demerits of HTTP:

• Anyone can view the content so there isn't privacy.
• Someone can change or replace the content, hence a big issue with data integrity. Due to this reason, the HTTP is insecure as it doesn't include any encryption methods.
• There is no such clarity about whom you are talking. If anyone tries to intercept the request, that the person can get a username and password.

Demerits of HTTPS:

• The HTTPS protocol steals confidential info from cached pages which are on the web browser.
• The SSL data is encrypted during transmission on the network only. Thus, it cannot clear the text inside the browser memory.
• The HTTPS is able to increase the organization's computational overhead and network overhead.