Andrew asks:
For example, if I visit https://somewebsite.com/ can someone sniffing my network traffic still detect that I’m viewing that site or is it encrypted?
2 Answers -
Chris Hoffman
January 16, 2012Yes. They can still see that you’re communicating with that website. What they can’t see is the specific part of the site you’re accessing. So if you’re accessing https://example.com/supersecretplace, they’ll see “example.com” but not the “/supersecretplace” part.
James Bruce
January 16, 2012If the attacker is sniffing locally on the same network, they can perform a very simple man-in-the-middle attack, which means they can intercept all of your traffic and de-crypt it easily. SSL is not secure against a local attacker.