YouTube's road to HTTPS
HTTPS provides critical security and data integrity for the web and for all web users. So what took us so long? As we gradually moved YouTube to HTTPS, we faced several unique challenges:
- Lots of traffic! Our CDN, the Google Global Cache, serves a massive amount of video, and migrating it all to HTTPS is no small feat. Luckily, hardware acceleration for AES is widespread, so we were able to encrypt virtually all video serving without adding machines. (Yes, HTTPS is fast now.)
- Lots of devices! You watch YouTube videos on everything from flip phones to smart TVs. We A/B tested HTTPS on every device to ensure that users would not be negatively impacted. We found that HTTPS improved quality of experience on most clients: by ensuring content integrity, we virtually eliminated many types of streaming errors.
- Lots of requests! Mixed content—any insecure request made in a secure context—poses a challenge for any large website or app. We get an alert when an insecure request is made from any of our clients and will block all mixed content using Content Security Policy on the web, App Transport Security on iOS, and uses CleartextTraffic on Android. Ads on YouTube have used HTTPS since 2014.
We're also proud to be using HTTP Secure Transport Security (HSTS) on youtube.com to cut down on HTTP to HTTPS redirects. This improves both security and latency for end users. Our HSTS lifetime is one year, and we hope to preload this soon in web browsers.
97 percent is pretty good, but why isn't YouTube at 100 percent? In short, some devices do not fully support modern HTTPS. Over time, to keep YouTube users as safe as possible, we will gradually phase out insecure connections.
In the real world, we know that any non-secure HTTP traffic could be vulnerable to attackers. All websites and apps should be protected with HTTPS — if you’re a developer that hasn’t yet migrated, get started today.
Sean Watson, Software Engineer, recently watched "GoPro: Fire Vortex Cannon with the Backyard Scientist."
Jon Levine, Product Manager, recently watched "Sega Saturn CD - Cracked after 20 years."