Surprisingly, the story of HTTPS starts somewhere else—it starts with HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol). HTTP is a web protocol, through which information is sent online between the user's web browser and the website they're trying to visit. HTTP defines the structure of this data and the way it's being sent. This topic is highly technical, and we certainly don't need to understand it from top to bottom just for the purpose of what we're discussing in this chapter.
Overall, the current way in which HTTP is implemented doesn't allow for very secure connections. For the most part, with HTTP, data is transmitted in plain text, which means that if someone were to intercept the communication, they would be able to see everything that's being transmitted. Now, this may not seem like much of a problem at first...