Publicly available information in the web easily becomes the subject of different types of cyber-attacks. Often it is not enough just to keep the so-called "bad guys" out. Sometimes, they won't bother gaining authentication at all and may prefer to carry out a man-in-the-middle (MiM) attack, pretending to be the final receiver of a message and sniffing the communication channel that transmits the data—or even worse, altering the data while it flows.
Being a text-based protocol, HTTP transfers data in a human-readable format, which makes it an easy victim of MiM attacks. Unless transferred in an encrypted format, all of the contacts data of our service is vulnerable to MiM attacks. In this section, we will switch our transport from an insecure HTTP protocol to the secure HTTPS protocol.
HTTPS is secured by asymmetric cryptography, also known as public-key encryption. It is based on a pair of keys that are mathematically related. The key used for encryption is called...