Secure communication through HTTPS provides both source integrity—so that a given client can be confident that the retrieved resource originates from the authority of the named entity—and a means to prevent eavesdropping.

HTTPS is public key infrastructure that builds on top of DNS. The bearer of a certificate from a certificate authority can assert its legitimacy to interested clients (e.g. Web site visitors). Certificates are issued on the basis of the applying party's common name, which is derived from its domain name (or, in rarer cases, for the subject's IP address, as in the case of Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 public DNS resolver, sidestepping the domain name system for its own identity).

See also

Let's Encrypt