Strict Transport Security
With Internet usage growth, more and more information is being passed around on the network. Many of websites manage their user information by using sessions, to offer their user-friendly environment. As http sends data over the Internet in plain text, attackers can capture the network traffic of users who have an unencrypted connection to access sites and services on public networks. Therefore, many websites such as Gmail, Facebook, and PayPal only allow https connections, in order to secure their transmission. However, when some web sites redirect http to https, non-encrypted versions of the sites may be exposed to a man-in-the-middle-attack before it redirects. Strict Transport Security, which is a web security policy mechanism, will let a website inform the browser not to load the site using http and to automatically convert all access to the site using an http to https request. This project details the definition of http/https connections and attacks on session management. It demonstrates vulnerabilities of https without the Strict Transport Security feature by doing session hijacking attacks. Finally, it describes the advantages of Strict Transport Security implementation.