The imminent death of HTTP/1.1 and its risks are not fully understood

Let's Encrypt had an outage today, and websites started disappearing off the web, progressively. It serves 60% of websites in the world. No wonder the world noticed.

And if you think we can still deploy HTTP websites, you are wrong, because browsers:

  • show any website served over HTTP as explicitly not secure in the address bar.
  • limit many web APIs to "secure" contexts
  • upgrade mixed-content so that HTTPS sites cannot request HTTP-only resources
  • increasingly attempt HTTPS to a site first even if linked/typed as HTTP
  • warn about downloads over HTTP...

Moreover, browsers will continue to phase-out the unsecure HTTP over time.

But it does not stop there. HTTP/1.1 is on the verge of extinction.

According to Cloudflare Radar, HTTP/1.1 usage is below 10%, and since HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 have TLS baked in the specifications, chances of quickly falling back to unencrypted HTTP connections are slim.

The last stab in the back are HTTP/1.1 Desync attacks joyfully popularized by James Kettle in DEFCON and Black Hat conferences.

HTTP/1.1 is dying and the decentralized nature of the web is dying with it.