🖥️Chapter 3 : How Websites Work?

Understanding the architecture and the technologies used in websites is mandatory for privacy engineers. This chapter helps you get the full picture of the data processing on modern websites.

In order for you to see the Hitchhiker's Guide to Privacy Engineering, the Gitlab server hosting this content is sent over the Internet piece by piece in the form of several thousand data packets.

Data packets traveled over cables and radio waves and through routers and switches from our web server to your computer or device.

Days passed, and Red was not convinced that her brother, Ray was dead. She knew he was out there, somewhere in the galaxy. For the first time in my life in the Academy, I am reluctant to attend any of the classes. They are wasting my time and I need to find out what happened. I need to find a way to talk to the Grandmaster. Now. - Journals of Order of Epoch, 2341 Anno Domini

Your computer or smartphone received those packets and passed them to your device's browser, and your browser interpreted the data within the packets in order to display the text you are reading now.

👇 Here is what goes under the hood in milliseconds between your browser and HGPE server after you opened this website: 👇

👀 DNS query

When your browser started to load this webpage, it likely first made a DNS query to find out this website's IP address.

🫱🫲 TCP handshake

Your browser opened a connection with that IP address.

🔐 TLS handshake

Your browser also set up encryption between Hitchhiker's Guide to Privacy Engineering web server and your device so that attackers cannot read the data packets that travel between those two endpoints.

📩 HTTP request

Your browser requested the content that appears on this webpage.

🎁 HTTP response

Servers transmit the content in the form of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code, broken up into a series of data packets. Once your device received the packets and verified it had received all of them, your browser interpreted the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code contained in the packets to render this article about how the Internet works.

Now let's take a deeper look at how actually websites work.