Acronym for Secure Hypertext Transport Protocol, it is an extension of the World Wide Web’s Hypertext Transport Protocol (HTTP) that supports secure commercial transactions on the Web. Secure HTTP provides this support in two ways: by assuring vendors that the customers attempting to buy the vendors’ wares are who they say they are (authentication) and by encrypting sensitive information (such as credit card numbers) so that it cannot be intercepted while en route. Secure HTTP was developed by Enterprise Integration Technology (EIT) and the National Center for Supercomputer Applications (NCSA), with the subsequent commercial development of Terisa Systems. Netscape Communications developed a competing security technology, the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol.
S-HTTP
