Surprisingly, the story with HTTPS starts somewhere else--it starts with HTTP. As you possibly know, HTTP stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol, which 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 that 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, the data is being 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...