What happened?

Check out that lovely lock icon!

You might have noticed that the URL on our company site changed just a bit, from http://quinn.com to https://quinn.com. A small change, but a fairly big difference.

That lock means that your interactions with our website are secured with TLS (transport layer security), the web standard for secure communications. That includes submissions to our contact and free-consultation forms. Also, Google slightly boosts the prominence of secure pages, according to their recent blog post.

Benefits of TLS

TLS (older versions were called “SSL”) is the internet technology that uses cryptography to provide

• Authentication (validates that the websites you visit are who they claim to be)
• Data integrity (ensures that web pages and form submissions haven’t been tampered with while traveling over the Internet)
• Encryption (eavesdroppers & “hackers” can’t read your communications)

Benefits to you, the web site owner

• SEO: correctly & consistently implementing TLS-always is a ranking signal for Google which means your site may float up a bit in search results
• With SPDY & HTTP/2.0, implementing always-on TLS can reduce infrastructure requirements (CPU, bandwidth, memory), especially when implemented with an efficient web server like nginx

Benefits to your web site’s visitors

• Privacy

  Encryption means that no eavesdroppers can listen in on people’s activities on the websites they use.

• Trust

  Authentication means that web users know that the sites they use are the ones they mean to use. Data integrity means that users know the information they get from web sites hasn’t been tampered with.

Take-away concept

All communications should be secure by default. As more websites turn on TLS all the time, the web becomes more trustworthy and more secure.

Audit a TLS implementation

To check the TLS implementation of your web browser, your site, or some other site that you use, you can use the tools at SSL Labs. The web site test, in particular, issues your site a letter grade and offers specific recommendations for improvements.

Resources

• Video by Google’s Ilya Gregorik & Pierre Far
• Slides from the video
• Is TLS fast yet? (The answer is a resounding “yes”)
• Mozilla TLS configuration guide
• Nginx configuration guide
• Qualys SSL labs—server & client tests & checks