 Hello everyone, and welcome back to another episode of The State of the Web. My guest today is Emily Schechter, who's here to tell us about HTTPS. You probably know of it as the thing you need to enable to make your site secure, but Emily's here as product manager on Chrome's security team to explain how it's so much more than that. Let's get started. So Emily, thank you for being here. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. Could you start by telling us about what is HTTPS and why is it so important? Yeah, so HTTPS is actually just HTTP, but over a secure connection. And what HTTPS actually gives us is identity, encryption, and integrity. So what that means is if you type HTTPS Google.com into a web browser, you can be sure that you're talking to the real Google.com, not some fake Google.com. It also means that no attacker on the network can actually see or modify any of the traffic. And this is actually really important because the collection of sites that you're browsing actually says a lot about your intentions, your behavior, and your identity. And the web is actually continuing to get even more powerful as Chrome tends to add new features to the web platform. For example, the web now has the geolocation API, which means that sites can see where I live, where I work, maybe where my doctor is or my kids go to school. So I really only want that information to be private between myself and the site that I trust. So HTTPS gives us these guarantees and this is why we think it's really important for the whole web to be HTTPS by default. So it's been around for a while and it has kind of accumulated some misunderstandings around it. Can you kind of help dispel some of the myths around it? Sure, yeah, so HTTPS has actually been around for quite a long time, but for many years it actually was very expensive and very slow and really hands-on and confusing to set up HTTPS. But the reality is that people all over the web have worked hard to make that change and it's become a lot cheaper and a lot easier to set up HTTPS. People still now think, you know, some of these myths about how it used to be are still true, but the reality is that that has changed. So for example, it used to be really expensive to set up HTTPS because you had to buy a certificate from what's called a certificate authority. But now there are certificate authorities out there that will give you a free certificate and make it really automatic and easy to set up. One of the examples is Let's Encrypt. So this has actually changed HTTPS and made it much easier to adopt. So what is the state of HTTPS now? I look at HTTP Archive data and it says that adoption is around like 60% and when you go back and look through like seven years of data, you can see it's actually rising like pretty steeply. So what are the tools that you use to understand the state of HTTPS and what is it? So Chrome has a public transparency report where we publish data about what we're seeing in Chrome in terms of the amount of HTTPS usage that's out there on the web. So for example, what we're seeing is the usage in Chrome on all of the different Chrome platforms on desktop and on mobile is been rising over the years. And if you go on to the HTTPS transparency report, you can see Chrome platform, how the usage is increasing. You can also see not only this in terms of the pages that are loaded over HTTPS but also browsing time because as you might imagine, people are spending different amounts of time on different sites and we can see that across the different Chrome platforms is growing as well. It's also broken down by country which is pretty interesting because you can see how different countries all over the world are doing on their adoption of HTTPS. Some other things that are on the transparency report are HTTPS adoption actually at Google. So you can see Google is a big site just like any other site. It took us a long time to actually get this ramped up. And so it's pretty cool that the transparency report also shows how HTTPS has grown at Google for all of our different products. So what kinds of things is Chrome doing to increase HTTPS adoption? So I would say there are two main areas where Chrome has made slow changes over time to encourage HTTPS adoption. And the first is in Chrome's UI for connection security. So Chrome shows an icon in the address bar that indicates connection security and we've actually changed this icon over time to help users understand the lack of security in HTTP connections. So Chrome used to show just this plain circled I icon for HTTP connections and we thought that was actually a problem because it really doesn't indicate to people at all that there's no security with an HTTP connection. And what we'd actually like to get to for all HTTP connections is this kind of scary, red, not secure warning. But we think that if we just roll that out for all HTTP sites right away it actually could cause some panic, right? Because we don't want the web to seem scary. We don't want people to see this warning all the time. And we've also seen that people get what's called warning fatigue which is that if they see warnings too many times over and over they start to ignore them, they stop paying attention to them. So we want to be honest with users without sort of inciting chaos and panic. So what we've done is we've actually rolled out the warning slowly over time increasing. So we first started showing this gray I, not secure, in the address bar just for HTTP pages with passwords or credit cards. And then sometime later we started showing the warning also when users enter data or for incognito pages. And we actually just announced that in July of this year we're going to start showing it on all HTTP pages. So we've actually rolled that out over time. We've seen the amount of HTTPS usage increase. And because HTTPS usage has increased then we're not too scared about the warning fatigue that would have shown from the warning. And so what about the technical APIs on the web? Right, so another thing that we've done in Chrome 2 encourage HTTPS adoption and also to make the web more secure to require HTTPS for web APIs that are very powerful. So for new APIs that have come out like Service Workers, because Service Worker is such a powerful API we've actually required HTTPS to use it. This also goes for HTTP2 which really improves performance and it actually requires HTTPS. But we've also taken a look at APIs that already exist on the web and we've actually deprecated usage over not secure connections to HTTPS APIs that are very powerful. So an example here is Geolocation. There's also GetUserMedia which is about getting the photos on your phone. And so now sites can no longer use those over HTTP. This is like patching holes in security on the web. Exactly. That's great. So where do you think we're heading with HTTPS? Are we going to achieve 100% adoption and then we can all like go home or is our job not yet done? As we talked about earlier, HTTPS is still not at 100% yet there. So we still definitely have ways to go. I don't know that we're going to get to 100% because I think there's always some kind of driftwood sites on the web, things that people don't maintain. But I would like to see us get close. So if you know any sites out there that are still HTTP you should go tell them to turn on HTTPS. They said no then tell them to come talk to me and I'll tell them why they should. And users on the web can also vote with their feet. If their bank isn't secure, go find a secure banking website. Put your money somewhere else. So what are some of the knots that websites need to untangle when they need to make that switch from HTTP to HTTPS? Yeah, so migrating your website to HTTPS it's not as easy as just putting an S on the end of the name of the website. It's not as easy as just getting a security certificate. You actually have to look and make sure that all of the services it depends on also support HTTPS. So for example a large complex site might depend on many ad networks maybe analytics providers. And so the sites have to sort of take an inventory to first see what are all of these third party dependencies that I have and then do they actually support HTTPS and then if they don't they might have to go out there and actually convince them to start supporting HTTPS. So it can actually be sort of a project management type project as well to like make sure that you've sort of done spring cleaning up the whole site. Well Emily, thank you so much for being here and telling us about HTTPS and I learned that there's so much more to it than just the S at the end of the URL or at the end of the protocol in the URL and how it's actually like deeply ingrained with the APIs that people use. Thank you for being here. Sure, thanks for having me. So if you'd like to weigh in on the HTTPS discussion leave a comment below. We're gonna have links to everything we talked about in the description. Tune in next time. Thanks for watching. We'll see you in the next one.