Chrome gets a security panel to help developers deploy HTTPS

Google today launched a new security panel in the DevTools section of Chrome 48, promising it will roll out over the next few days. The goal is to help developers deploy HTTPS on their websites and services.

HTTPS is a more secure version of the HTTP protocol used on the Internet to connect users to websites. Secure connections are widely considered a necessary measure to decrease the risk of users being vulnerable to content injection (which can result in eavesdropping, man-in-the-middle attacks, and other data modification). In August 2014, Google’s search algorithm started prioritizing encrypted sites in search results with a slight ranking boost, and in December 2015, Google started indexing HTTPS pages by default.

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To take advantage of this new feature, just open it up directly in DevTools. Alternatively, you can also click on the URL bar’s lock icon, and then hit the Details link.

The security panel displays connection information for every network request in an effort to identify potential connection errors:

If you’re not seeing a green lock in Chrome, which represents a secure connection, you can now use DevTools to figure out why. The overview for a given page will show you information about:

• Certificate verification, which indicates whether your site has proven its identity with a TLS certificate.
• TLS connection, which indicates whether your site uses a modern, secure protocol and ciphersuite.
• Subresource security, indicating whether your site loads insecure HTTP subresources (otherwise known as mixed content).

The security panel also lets you check the state of your subresources. Clicking on a subresource gives you in-depth information about the security state of a given connection and its certificate.

A more detailed rundown of the security in Chrome DevTools is available on Google Developers.

Chrome 48 is a big release in terms of security. In addition to this security panel, the new version also removes RC4 encryption and includes 37 security fixes.

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