Are all URLs encrypted when using TLS/SSL (HTTPS) encryption? I would like to know because I want all URL data to be hidden when using TLS/SSL (HTTPS).
If TLS/SSL gives you total URL encryption then I don't have to worry about hiding confidential information from URLs.
Yes, the SSL connection is between the TCP layer and the HTTP layer. The client and server first establish a secure encrypted TCP connection (via the SSL/TLS protocol) and then the client will send the HTTP request (GET, POST, DELETE...) over that encrypted TCP connection.
Note however (as also noted in the comments) that the domain name part of the URL is sent in clear text during the first part of the TLS negotiation. So, the domain name of the server can be sniffed. But not the rest of the URL.
As the other answers have already pointed out, https "URLs" are indeed encrypted. However, your DNS request/response when resolving the domain name is probably not, and of course, if you were using a browser, your URLs might be recorded too.
Entire request and response is encrypted, including URL.
Note that when you use a HTTP Proxy, it knows the address (domain) of the target server, but doesn't know the requested path on this server (i.e. request and response are always encrypted).
Yes and no.
This may change in future with encrypted SNI and DNS but as of 2018 both technologies are not commonly in use.
Note for GET requests the user will still be able to cut and paste the URL out of the location bar, and you will probably not want to put confidential information in there that can be seen by anyone looking at the screen.
It is now 2019 and the TLS v1.3 has been released. According to Cloudflare, the server name indication (SNI aka the hostname) can be encrypted thanks to TLS v1.3. So, I told myself great! Let's see how it looks within the TCP packets of cloudflare.com So, I caught a "client hello" handshake packet from a response of the cloudflare server using Google Chrome as browser & wireshark as packet sniffer. I still can read the hostname in plain text within the Client hello packet as you can see below. It is not encrypted.
So, beware of what you can read because this is still not an anonymous connection. A middleware application between the client and the server could log every domain that are requested by a client.
So, it looks like the encryption of the SNI requires additional implementations to work along with TLSv1.3
UPDATE June 2020: It looks like the Encrypted SNI is initiated by the browser. Cloudflare has a page for you to check if your browser supports Encrypted SNI:
https://www.cloudflare.com/ssl/encrypted-sni/
At this point, I think Google chrome does not support it. You can activate Encrypted SNI in Firefox manually. When I tried it for some reason, it didn't work instantly. I restarted Firefox twice before it worked:
Type: about:config in the URL field.
Check if network.security.esni.enabled is true. Clear your cache / restart
Go to the website, I mentioned before.
As you can see VPN services are still useful today for people who want to ensure that a coffee shop owner does not log the list of websites that people visit.
Althought there are some good answers already here, most of them are focusing in browser navigation. I'm writing this in 2018 and probably someone wants to know about the security of mobile apps.
For mobile apps, if you control both ends of the application (server and app), as long as you use HTTPS you're secure. iOS or Android will verify the certificate and mitigate possible MiM attacks (that would be the only weak point in all this). You can send sensitive data through HTTPS connections that it will be encrypted during transport. Just your app and the server will know any parameters sent through https.
The only "maybe" here would be if client or server are infected with malicious software that can see the data before it is wrapped in https. But if someone is infected with this kind of software, they will have access to the data, no matter what you use to transport it.
While you already have very good answers, I really like the explanation on this website: https://https.cio.gov/faq/#what-information-does-https-protect
in short: using HTTPS hides:
Additionally, if you're building a ReSTful API, browser leakage and http referer issues are mostly mitigated as the client may not be a browser and you may not have people clicking links.
If this is the case I'd recommend oAuth2 login to obtain a bearer token. In which case the only sensitive data would be the initial credentials...which should probably be in a post request anyway
