Today we live in the advanced ‘Cyber Space’ where we all are
connected through various means of Communications via using Internet.
More than 99% internet users visit lot of websites includes Social
Networking, Email Services, E-Commerce, Banking etc. where we pass
our User Names & Passwords many a times each day. At the same
time the problems of ‘Cyber Crimes’ are also rising up where most
of the problems are related to the Hacking of the User Names and
password. Today if we see, most of the websites are on http instead
of https which is supposed to be a much secure protocol. That extra
"S" in the URL means that your connection is secure and
it's much harder for anyone else to see what you're doing. However,
the question is that if HTTPS is more secure, then why doesn't the
entire Web use it for security reasons?
HTTPS is used only by those sites that handle money, like your bank's
website or shopping carts that requires financial information like
Credit Card details or the Online Bank Details. For example if we
talk about the websites of Banks, it is mandatory for every Bank to
implement https on their website, as per the RBI guidelines. It is
easy for anyone to capture your current session's log-in cookies in
any insecure networks like your College/ Office hotspot or public
Wi-Fi at the restaurants.
You might not mind anyone reading your messages on twitter or so.
However, you never prefer anyone sniffing your User Name &
Password. That’s why Twitter has announced a new option recently to
force to HTTPS connection. However, it is available only for the
Desktop Browsers and not available for the Mobile Browsers which is
another issue.
Slowly and gradually the websites are moving on HTTPS but why not
entire web should move towards it? That’s the question that was put
in front of Dr. Anup Girdhar,
(CEO-Sedulity Groups) during
an interview. There are lot of issues due to which it’s taking lot
of time to move from http to https completely. The major problem is
the high cost which is to be paid to get the secure Certificate due
to which most of the vendors do not prefer to move to https. The
another problem which is also encountered is the slow performance hit
when using https, said Dr.
Girdhar.
Moreover, if you calculate the cost of running the https site, it is
expensive as compare to the http site. An https website doesn’t
work because it requires good Broadband speed and should be the
Browser Compliant. It is possible with the Man-in-the-middle attack
to crack the password on http sites, where https websites are
comparatively more secured. However, the hackers are so advanced that
they’ve even hacked the https websites as well, which has become
the another security constraint for the W3C. Certain add-ons and
plugins are available which simply recover the username &
password from the https websites as well. I have demonstrated the
same in one of the International conferences held at Singapore, said
Dr. Anup Girdhar.
If we measure, the reasons can be taken care of with providing
optimum level of solutions in order to get secure connections. So we
need to look broadly that if https will be implemented completely,
how well it safeguard our websites and protect our data.
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