Are HTTPS URLs encrypted

Question

Are all URLs encrypted when using TLS SSL  HTTPS  encryption  I would like to know because I want all URL data to be hidden when using TLS SSL  HTTPS    If TLS SSL gives you total URL encryption then I don t have to worry about hiding confidential information from URLs

User · Answer

As the other answers have already pointed out  https  URLs  are indeed encrypted  However  your DNS request response when resolving the domain name is probably not  and of course  if you were using a browser  your URLs might be recorded too

User · Answer

Yes and no     The server address portion is NOT encrypted since it is used to set up the connection   This may change in future with encrypted SNI and DNS but as of 2018 both technologies are not commonly in use   The path  query string etc  are encrypted   Note for GET requests the user will still be able to cut and paste the URL out of the location bar  and you will probably not want to put confidential information in there that can be seen by anyone looking at the screen

User · Answer

Linking to my answer on a duplicate question  Not only is the URL available in the browsers history  the server side logs but it s also sent as the HTTP Referer header which if you use third party content  exposes the URL to sources outside your control

User · Answer

Yes  the SSL connection is between the TCP layer and the HTTP layer   The client and server first establish a secure encrypted TCP connection  via the SSL TLS protocol  and then the client will send the HTTP request  GET  POST  DELETE     over that encrypted TCP connection

User · Answer

As the other answers have already pointed out  https  URLs  are indeed encrypted  However  your DNS request response when resolving the domain name is probably not  and of course  if you were using a browser  your URLs might be recorded too

User · Answer

As the other answers have already pointed out  https  URLs  are indeed encrypted  However  your DNS request response when resolving the domain name is probably not  and of course  if you were using a browser  your URLs might be recorded too

User · Answer

Additionally  if you re building a ReSTful API  browser leakage and http referer issues are mostly mitigated as the client may not be a browser and you may not have people clicking links   If this is the case I d recommend oAuth2 login to obtain a bearer token  In which case the only sensitive data would be the initial credentials   which should probably be in a post request anyway

User · Answer

An addition to the helpful answer from Marc Novakowski - the URL is stored in the logs on the server  e g   in  etc httpd logs ssl access log   so if you don t want the server to maintain the information over the longer term  don t put it in the URL

User · Answer

Yes and no     The server address portion is NOT encrypted since it is used to set up the connection   This may change in future with encrypted SNI and DNS but as of 2018 both technologies are not commonly in use   The path  query string etc  are encrypted   Note for GET requests the user will still be able to cut and paste the URL out of the location bar  and you will probably not want to put confidential information in there that can be seen by anyone looking at the screen

User · Answer

Entire request and response is encrypted  including URL   Note that when you use a HTTP Proxy  it knows the address  domain  of the target server  but doesn t know the requested path on this server  i e  request and response are always encrypted

User · Answer

Linking to my answer on a duplicate question  Not only is the URL available in the browsers history  the server side logs but it s also sent as the HTTP Referer header which if you use third party content  exposes the URL to sources outside your control

User · Answer

Entire request and response is encrypted  including URL   Note that when you use a HTTP Proxy  it knows the address  domain  of the target server  but doesn t know the requested path on this server  i e  request and response are always encrypted

User · Answer

Althought there are some good answers already here  most of them are focusing in browser navigation  I m writing this in 2018 and probably someone wants to know about the security of mobile apps   For mobile apps  if you control both ends of the application  server and app   as long as you use HTTPS you re secure  iOS or Android will verify the certificate and mitigate possible MiM attacks  that would be the only weak point in all this   You can send sensitive data through HTTPS connections that it will be encrypted during transport  Just your app and the server will know any parameters sent through https   The only  maybe  here would be if client or server are infected with malicious software that can see the data before it is wrapped in https  But if someone is infected with this kind of software  they will have access to the data  no matter what you use to transport it

User · Answer

As the other answers have already pointed out  https  URLs  are indeed encrypted  However  your DNS request response when resolving the domain name is probably not  and of course  if you were using a browser  your URLs might be recorded too

User · Answer

Entire request and response is encrypted  including URL   Note that when you use a HTTP Proxy  it knows the address  domain  of the target server  but doesn t know the requested path on this server  i e  request and response are always encrypted

User · Answer

You can not always count on privacy of the full URL either  For instance  as is sometimes the case on enterprise networks  supplied devices like your company PC are configured with an extra  trusted  root certificate so that your browser can quietly trust a proxy  man-in-the-middle   inspection of https traffic  This means that the full URL is exposed for inspection  This is usually saved to a log   Furthermore  your passwords are also exposed and probably logged and this is another reason to use one time passwords or to change your passwords frequently   Finally  the request and response content is also exposed if not otherwise encrypted   One example of the inspection setup is described by Checkpoint here  An old style  internet caf    using supplied PC s may also be set up this way

User · Answer

Yes and no     The server address portion is NOT encrypted since it is used to set up the connection   This may change in future with encrypted SNI and DNS but as of 2018 both technologies are not commonly in use   The path  query string etc  are encrypted   Note for GET requests the user will still be able to cut and paste the URL out of the location bar  and you will probably not want to put confidential information in there that can be seen by anyone looking at the screen

User · Answer

Althought there are some good answers already here  most of them are focusing in browser navigation  I m writing this in 2018 and probably someone wants to know about the security of mobile apps   For mobile apps  if you control both ends of the application  server and app   as long as you use HTTPS you re secure  iOS or Android will verify the certificate and mitigate possible MiM attacks  that would be the only weak point in all this   You can send sensitive data through HTTPS connections that it will be encrypted during transport  Just your app and the server will know any parameters sent through https   The only  maybe  here would be if client or server are infected with malicious software that can see the data before it is wrapped in https  But if someone is infected with this kind of software  they will have access to the data  no matter what you use to transport it

User · Answer

Additionally  if you re building a ReSTful API  browser leakage and http referer issues are mostly mitigated as the client may not be a browser and you may not have people clicking links   If this is the case I d recommend oAuth2 login to obtain a bearer token  In which case the only sensitive data would be the initial credentials   which should probably be in a post request anyway

User · Answer

While you already have very good answers  I really like the explanation on this website  https   https cio gov faq  what-information-does-https-protect  in short  using HTTPS hides    HTTP method query params POST body  if present  Request headers  cookies included  Status code

User · Answer

A third-party that is monitoring traffic may also be able to determine the page visited by examining your traffic an comparing it with the traffic another user has when visiting the site  For example if there were 2 pages only on a site  one much larger than the other  then comparison of the size of the data transfer would tell which page you visited  There are ways this could be hidden from the third-party but they re not normal server or browser behaviour  See for example this paper from SciRate  https   scirate com arxiv 1403 0297   In general other answers are correct  practically though this paper shows that pages visited  ie URL  can be determined quite effectively

User · Answer

Yes and no     The server address portion is NOT encrypted since it is used to set up the connection   This may change in future with encrypted SNI and DNS but as of 2018 both technologies are not commonly in use   The path  query string etc  are encrypted   Note for GET requests the user will still be able to cut and paste the URL out of the location bar  and you will probably not want to put confidential information in there that can be seen by anyone looking at the screen

User · Answer

I agree with the previous answers    To be explicit    With TLS  the first part of the URL  https   www example com   is still visible as it builds the connection  The second part   herearemygetparameters 1 2 3 4  is protected by TLS    However there are a number of reasons why you should not put parameters in the GET request    First  as already mentioned by others   - leakage through browser address bar - leakage through history  In addition to that you have leakage of URL through the http referer  user sees site A on TLS  then clicks a link to site B  If both sites are on TLS  the request to site B will contain the full URL from site A in the referer parameter of the request  And admin from site B can retrieve it from the log files of server B

User · Answer

Entire request and response is encrypted  including URL   Note that when you use a HTTP Proxy  it knows the address  domain  of the target server  but doesn t know the requested path on this server  i e  request and response are always encrypted

User · Answer

Yes  the SSL connection is between the TCP layer and the HTTP layer   The client and server first establish a secure encrypted TCP connection  via the SSL TLS protocol  and then the client will send the HTTP request  GET  POST  DELETE     over that encrypted TCP connection

User · Answer

Since nobody provided a wire capture  here s one  Server Name  the domain part of the URL  is presented in the ClientHello packet  in plain text  The following shows a browser request to  https   i stack imgur com path  some parameters amp go here  See this answer for more on TLS version fields  there are 3 of them - not versions  fields that each contain a version number   From https   www ietf org rfc rfc3546 txt   3 1  Server Name Indication  TLS  does not provide a mechanism for a client to tell a server the    name of the server it is contacting   It may be desirable for clients    to provide this information to facilitate secure connections to    servers that host multiple  virtual  servers at a single underlying    network address    In order to provide the server name  clients MAY include an extension    of type  quot server name quot  in the  extended  client hello    In short   FQDN  the domain part of the URL  MAY be transmitted in clear inside the ClientHello packet if SNI extension is used  The rest of the URL   path  some parameters amp go here  has no business being inside ClientHello since the request URL is a HTTP thing  OSI Layer 7   therefore it will never show up in a TLS handshake  Layer 4 or 5   That will come later on in a GET  path  some parameters amp go here HTTP 1 1 HTTP request  AFTER the secure TLS channel is established     EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Domain name MAY be transmitted in clear  if SNI extension is used in the TLS handshake  but URL  path and parameters  is always encrypted   MARCH 2019 UPDATE Thank you carlin scott for bringing this one up  The payload in the SNI extension can now be encrypted via this draft RFC proposal  This capability only exists in TLS 1 3  as an option and it s up to both ends to implement it  and there is no backwards compatibility with TLS 1 2 and below  CloudFlare is doing it and you can read more about the internals here     If the chicken must come before the egg  where do you put the chicken  In practice this means that instead of transmitting the FQDN in plain text  like the Wireshark capture shows   it is now encrypted  NOTE  This addresses the privacy aspect more than the security one since a reverse DNS lookup MAY reveal the intended destination host anyway  SEPTEMBER 2020 UPDATE There s now a draft RFC for encrypting the entire Client Hello message  not just the SNI part  https   datatracker ietf org doc draft-ietf-tls-esni  include text 1 At the time of writing this browser support is VERY limited

User · Answer

You can not always count on privacy of the full URL either  For instance  as is sometimes the case on enterprise networks  supplied devices like your company PC are configured with an extra  trusted  root certificate so that your browser can quietly trust a proxy  man-in-the-middle   inspection of https traffic  This means that the full URL is exposed for inspection  This is usually saved to a log   Furthermore  your passwords are also exposed and probably logged and this is another reason to use one time passwords or to change your passwords frequently   Finally  the request and response content is also exposed if not otherwise encrypted   One example of the inspection setup is described by Checkpoint here  An old style  internet caf    using supplied PC s may also be set up this way

User · Answer

Since nobody provided a wire capture  here s one  Server Name  the domain part of the URL  is presented in the ClientHello packet  in plain text  The following shows a browser request to  https   i stack imgur com path  some parameters amp go here  See this answer for more on TLS version fields  there are 3 of them - not versions  fields that each contain a version number   From https   www ietf org rfc rfc3546 txt   3 1  Server Name Indication  TLS  does not provide a mechanism for a client to tell a server the    name of the server it is contacting   It may be desirable for clients    to provide this information to facilitate secure connections to    servers that host multiple  virtual  servers at a single underlying    network address    In order to provide the server name  clients MAY include an extension    of type  quot server name quot  in the  extended  client hello    In short   FQDN  the domain part of the URL  MAY be transmitted in clear inside the ClientHello packet if SNI extension is used  The rest of the URL   path  some parameters amp go here  has no business being inside ClientHello since the request URL is a HTTP thing  OSI Layer 7   therefore it will never show up in a TLS handshake  Layer 4 or 5   That will come later on in a GET  path  some parameters amp go here HTTP 1 1 HTTP request  AFTER the secure TLS channel is established     EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Domain name MAY be transmitted in clear  if SNI extension is used in the TLS handshake  but URL  path and parameters  is always encrypted   MARCH 2019 UPDATE Thank you carlin scott for bringing this one up  The payload in the SNI extension can now be encrypted via this draft RFC proposal  This capability only exists in TLS 1 3  as an option and it s up to both ends to implement it  and there is no backwards compatibility with TLS 1 2 and below  CloudFlare is doing it and you can read more about the internals here     If the chicken must come before the egg  where do you put the chicken  In practice this means that instead of transmitting the FQDN in plain text  like the Wireshark capture shows   it is now encrypted  NOTE  This addresses the privacy aspect more than the security one since a reverse DNS lookup MAY reveal the intended destination host anyway  SEPTEMBER 2020 UPDATE There s now a draft RFC for encrypting the entire Client Hello message  not just the SNI part  https   datatracker ietf org doc draft-ietf-tls-esni  include text 1 At the time of writing this browser support is VERY limited

User · Answer

It is now 2019 and the TLS v1 3 has been released  According to Cloudflare  the server name indication  SNI aka the hostname  can be encrypted thanks to TLS v1 3  So  I told myself great  Let s see how it looks within the TCP packets of cloudflare com So  I caught a  quot client hello quot  handshake packet from a response of the cloudflare server using Google Chrome as browser  amp  wireshark as packet sniffer  I still can read the hostname in plain text within the Client hello packet as you can see below  It is not encrypted   So  beware of what you can read because this is still not an anonymous connection  A middleware application between the client and the server could log every domain that are requested by a client  So  it looks like the encryption of the SNI requires additional implementations to work along with TLSv1 3 UPDATE June 2020  It looks like the Encrypted SNI is initiated by the browser  Cloudflare has a page for you to check if your browser supports Encrypted SNI  https   www cloudflare com ssl encrypted-sni  At this point  I think Google chrome does not support it  You can activate Encrypted SNI in Firefox manually  When I tried it for some reason  it didn t work instantly  I restarted Firefox twice before it worked  Type  about config in the URL field  Check if network security esni enabled is true  Clear your cache   restart Go to the website  I mentioned before  As you can see VPN services are still useful today for people who want to ensure that a coffee shop owner does not log the list of websites that people visit

User · Answer

While you already have very good answers  I really like the explanation on this website  https   https cio gov faq  what-information-does-https-protect  in short  using HTTPS hides    HTTP method query params POST body  if present  Request headers  cookies included  Status code

User · Answer

Yes  the SSL connection is between the TCP layer and the HTTP layer   The client and server first establish a secure encrypted TCP connection  via the SSL TLS protocol  and then the client will send the HTTP request  GET  POST  DELETE     over that encrypted TCP connection

User · Answer

An addition to the helpful answer from Marc Novakowski - the URL is stored in the logs on the server  e g   in  etc httpd logs ssl access log   so if you don t want the server to maintain the information over the longer term  don t put it in the URL

User · Answer

I agree with the previous answers    To be explicit    With TLS  the first part of the URL  https   www example com   is still visible as it builds the connection  The second part   herearemygetparameters 1 2 3 4  is protected by TLS    However there are a number of reasons why you should not put parameters in the GET request    First  as already mentioned by others   - leakage through browser address bar - leakage through history  In addition to that you have leakage of URL through the http referer  user sees site A on TLS  then clicks a link to site B  If both sites are on TLS  the request to site B will contain the full URL from site A in the referer parameter of the request  And admin from site B can retrieve it from the log files of server B

User · Answer

It is now 2019 and the TLS v1 3 has been released  According to Cloudflare  the server name indication  SNI aka the hostname  can be encrypted thanks to TLS v1 3  So  I told myself great  Let s see how it looks within the TCP packets of cloudflare com So  I caught a  quot client hello quot  handshake packet from a response of the cloudflare server using Google Chrome as browser  amp  wireshark as packet sniffer  I still can read the hostname in plain text within the Client hello packet as you can see below  It is not encrypted   So  beware of what you can read because this is still not an anonymous connection  A middleware application between the client and the server could log every domain that are requested by a client  So  it looks like the encryption of the SNI requires additional implementations to work along with TLSv1 3 UPDATE June 2020  It looks like the Encrypted SNI is initiated by the browser  Cloudflare has a page for you to check if your browser supports Encrypted SNI  https   www cloudflare com ssl encrypted-sni  At this point  I think Google chrome does not support it  You can activate Encrypted SNI in Firefox manually  When I tried it for some reason  it didn t work instantly  I restarted Firefox twice before it worked  Type  about config in the URL field  Check if network security esni enabled is true  Clear your cache   restart Go to the website  I mentioned before  As you can see VPN services are still useful today for people who want to ensure that a coffee shop owner does not log the list of websites that people visit

User · Answer

A third-party that is monitoring traffic may also be able to determine the page visited by examining your traffic an comparing it with the traffic another user has when visiting the site  For example if there were 2 pages only on a site  one much larger than the other  then comparison of the size of the data transfer would tell which page you visited  There are ways this could be hidden from the third-party but they re not normal server or browser behaviour  See for example this paper from SciRate  https   scirate com arxiv 1403 0297   In general other answers are correct  practically though this paper shows that pages visited  ie URL  can be determined quite effectively

User · Answer

Yes  the SSL connection is between the TCP layer and the HTTP layer   The client and server first establish a secure encrypted TCP connection  via the SSL TLS protocol  and then the client will send the HTTP request  GET  POST  DELETE     over that encrypted TCP connection

[ssl] Are HTTPS URLs encrypted?

Examples related to ssl

Examples related to https

Examples related to httprequest