(logo)  Secure connections

Purpose

Some sites ask you to supply personal or secret information, like your credit card number to pay for some service or goods you order. When you supply this information and click the send button, this information is sent over the internet. You will want to be sure of two things:
  1. That the company asking you for this sensitive information, really is the company they claim to be, and
  2. That no-one is eavesdropping at one of the many intermediate computers that the message passes through, and reads your private information.
Secure connections through SSL offer a way to achieve both security goals. It uses encryption so that no-one can read your data except the one you are sending it to. It uses certificates to ensure that no-one can forge their identity and claim to be someone else.

You might want to read more about how SSL works.

Secure connections can only ensure that your information isn't seen by others. It can't in any way prevent that the legitimate receiver of your data won't abuse it.

MiamiSSL

AWeb supports MiamiSSL, the secure socket layer (SSL) implementation available for registered users of the Miami TCP stack by Holger Kruse.

Be sure of the sender's identity

Next to the status bar field at the top of the browser window, is a small indicator. It tells you if the current document was retrieved over a secure connection. If it is, that means that the sender of the document is really the one they claim to be, and the page wasn't forged by an impersonator.

By default, this indicator is blank for a normal document, and a small image of a lock for a secure document, but you can change the images used.

If a document uses frames, the image reflects the security status of the frame that has focus. Simply click in the frame to see if it is secure.

Note that the cipher method that was used in the connection is shown in the information window.

Protect your form data

Even if a document was retrieved over a secure connection, that doesn't guarantee that form data will be sent away over a secure connection too. Therefore AWeb is able to warn you when you are about to send data with a form in an unsecure way, and give you an opportunity to cancel it. You can enable this by selecting the Warn before sending unsecure form data option.

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