1. An extension of the World Wide Web's HyperText Transport Protocol (HTTP) that supports secure commercial transactions on the Web. Secure HTTP provides this support in two ways by assuring vendors that the customers attempting to buy the vendors' wares are who they say they are (authentication) and by encrypting sensitive information, such as credit-card numbers , so that it cannot be intercepted while en route. Secure HTTP was developed by Enterprise Integration Technology (EIT) and the National Center Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), with subsequent commercial development by Terisa system. Netscape communications developed a competing security technology , the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol. The two security protocols are incompatible, and for a time it was feared that no single widely accepted security protocol would emerge. In early 1995, however Netscape invested heavily in Terisa Systems and announced that it would integrate Secure HTTTP and SSL to provide the Web community with a single security protocol that will work with any security-capable browser. From QUECID