Re: http proxying

From: Henrik Nordstrom <hno@dont-contact.us>
Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2000 02:22:51 +0100

Kendall Lister wrote:

> perhaps someone could explain how HTTP requests happen through
> SSL, or at least how it differs from normal?

https is HTTP with SSL as transport protocol, where plain HTTP uses TCP
as it's transport protocol. You can view SSL as a encryption layer
between HTTP and TCP/IP.

SSL is a encrypted transport protocol using public key encryption for
authentication of the server and client and exchanges of shared secrets,
and shared-secret encryption protocols for the bulk data.

SSL is tunneled thru HTTP proxies using the CONNECT method as described
earlier.

The encryption protects the HTTP data from eavesdropping and tampering
by any man-in-the-middle component, like proxies and such. This applies
to both the requests and the responses.

--
Henrik Nordstrom
Received on Wed Jan 12 2000 - 19:03:19 MST

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