Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) is a combination of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol with the SSL/TLS protocol to provide encrypted communication and secure identification of a network web server.
Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (https) is a widely used communications protocol for secure communication over a computer network, with especially wide deployment on the Internet.
Technically, it is not a protocol in itself; rather, it is the result of simply putting SSL/TLS between Hypertext Transfer Protocol (http) and tcp, thus adding the security capabilities of ssl/tls to standard http communications.
- HTTP:
HTTP | TCP | lower-layer-protocols - HTTPS:
HTTP | TLS/SSL | TCP | lower-layer-protocols
HTTP uses the client/server computing model (client-server), where a client makes a request of a server for access to a file or to pass a message to a program that runs in the server computer. The server takes the requested action and returns a response.
See the tag ssl for more information on Transport Layer Security (tls) and its predecessor, Secure Sockets Layer (ssl).
