https

[jes]

https = hyper text transfer protocol security?
How secure it it? How does it work?

[Paul Komski]

Most commonly after setting a session cookie on the user's side all "conversations" between you and the website are encrypted for the rest of your session on that site during transmission of data. The encryption is to all intents and purposes unbreakable and in that way very secure.

I think the main security arises when moving from a secure to a non-secure page, when if the the server side has not been set-up correctly it is possible to "hijack" the URI and a malicious user can continue to surf that site as if they were you. So as long as the web-design is good then https is (so far) very safe.