Visiting "https" Website with IE

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∟Visiting "https" Website with IE

This section describes how IE (Internet Explorer) shows a lock icon when you visit an 'https' Website to provide you more security related information.

As I mentioned earlier in the book, Web browsers play very important roles in using HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) to secure Web communications. Now let's see how IE (Internet Explorer), as a major Web browser, supports HTTPS.

1. Run IE and go to Yahoo home page www.yahoo.com.

2. Click "Mail" in the Yahoo Sites menu.

3. After IE finishing displaying the login page, look at the Website address area. You will see that address starts with "https" and a lock icon is displayed next to the address:

IE Showing Lock Icon on HTTPS Address

What happened here was:

When the link "Mail" was clicked, IE was redirected to use this URL: https://login.yahoo.com/...
Since this is HTTPS based URL, IE requested for the server, login.yahoo.com, to provide the server certificate.
IE validated the server certificate and found no issue.
IE created a one-time encryption key, encrypted with server's public key and delivered to the server.
Server returned the login page document encrypted with the encryption key.

Lock icon in the Web address area indicates that this page is secured with HTTPS. If you click the lock icon, IE will provide you more security related information for this page. See next sections for more tutorials.