Secure Connections: The Handshake That Saves Your Data

We live in an age where the internet has integrated into our daily lives. Children start using the internet before they can understand internet safety, the older generation picks up new skills to adapt to changing times, and the COVID epidemic encouraged remote work and home shopping that increased internet use for daily functioning (Shbair et al. l, 2020). Developing secure networks promotes trust between the software developer and the public. While a software developer could create networks that overlook the importance of using a secure protocol, the HTTP clear text format leaves unsuspecting users vulnerable to having their images, data, and private information altered and stolen. Creating secure communication channels protects the user and prepares a website to expand to include forms that collect sensitive data, protects personal photographs, files, and data that dangerous hackers should not have access to, and begins to create an industry standard that discourages dangerous hackers from taking advantage of innocent internet users. 

Software developers should go the extra mile to protect their users when developing applications. In a popular video, “Why are you still using HTTP,” David Bombel agrees that a developer should forgo HTTP in preference for HTTPS to create encrypted traffic whenever possible (2017). Some might argue that HTTP provides a sufficient web browsing environment. They might say developers should implement HTTPS only when users need to enter secure information they do not want everyone on the web to see. They would suggest a user searching for images on Google in the browser could use HTTP because the security of HTTP would be sufficient for that task. Alternatively, a user buying a product from Amazon would use HTTPS because entering private credit card information requires more security to keep all users on the web from accessing sensitive information. While defaulting to HTTP when users are not entering sensitive data into the browser allows a programmer to forgo the verification process to obtain an SSL certificate, it is undeniable that the average user does not possess the programming knowledge to understand the risk of a malicious middleman attack (Patel, 2023). Software developers adopt an ethical responsibility to the public to create programs with the understanding that the average user does not have cybersecurity knowledge. Software developers should not abandon their users to determine when they should use HTTP and when they should use HTTPS. Software developers should transition to using HTTPS by default instead of HTTP in creating web applications and networks.


References:

Bombal, D. (2020). Why are you still using HTTP [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfZNhf2Yc8k

Patel, N. (2023). When Should You Use HTTPs vs HTTP?. NPdigital (Online), https://neilpatel.com/blog/https-vs-http/

Shbair, W. M., Cholez, T., Francois, J., & Chrisment, I. (2020, August 19). A survey of HTTPS traffic and services identification approaches. arXiv.org. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2008.08339

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