Hi all

In this day and age, you should encrypt everything, not just forms. We do for anything we implement.

Yes there is an initial handshake to get https going, but after that the overheads are remarkably low. Eg from five years ago

In January this year (2010), Gmail switched to using HTTPS for everything by default. Previously it had been introduced as an option, but now all of our users use HTTPS to secure their email between their browsers and Google, all the time. In order to do this we had to deploy no additional machines and no special hardware. On our production frontend machines, SSL/TLS accounts for less than 1% of the CPU load, less than 10KB of memory per connection and less than 2% of network overhead. Many people believe that SSL takes a lot of CPU time and we hope the above numbers (public for the first time) will help to dispel that.

https://www.imperialviolet.org/2010/06/25/overclocking-ssl.html

In January this year (2010), Gmail switched to using HTTPS for everything by default. Previously it had been introduced as an option, but now all of our users use HTTPS to secure their email between their browsers and Google, all the time. In order to do this we had to deploy no additional machines and no special hardware. On our production frontend machines, SSL/TLS accounts for less than 1% of the CPU load, less than 10KB of memory per connection and less than 2% of network overhead. Many people believe that SSL takes a lot of CPU time and we hope the above numbers (public for the first time) will help to dispel that.In January this year (2010), Gmail switched to using HTTPS for everything by default. Previously it had been introduced as an option, but now all of our users use HTTPS to secure their email between their browsers and Google, all the time. In order to do this we had to deploy no additional machines and no special hardware. On our production frontend machines, SSL/TLS accounts for less than 1% of the CPU load, less than 10KB of memory per connection and less than 2% of network overhead. Many people believe that SSL takes a lot of CPU time and we hope the above numbers (public for the first time) will help to dispel that.

See also https://https.cio.gov/everything/ for general motivation

mark

Mark van Harmelen

phone   +44 7830 212 464
skype    markvanharmelen


On Thu, Sep 24, 2015 at 7:28 PM, Chris Spray <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Hi, If it is any help, our security team/policy requires that we use https for all data input forms on our web pages, sensitive data or not.

Chris

-----Original Message-----
From: This list is for those interested in Data Protection issues [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Phil Bradshaw
Sent: 24 September 2015 17:01
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [data-protection] Online complaints

Early Friday question - getting in first

If an organisation is dealing with sensitive issues e.g. health, social services is it acceptable to have an online complaint form which uses standard http protocol rather than https ?

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