Amazon S3 Gotcha: Using Virtual Host URLs with HTTPS

Amazon S3 is a great place to store static content for your web site. If the content is sensitive you’ll want to prevent the content from being visible while in transit from the S3 servers to the client. The standard way to secure the content during transfer is by https - simply request the content via an https URL. However, this approach has a problem: it does not work for content in S3 buckets that are accessed via a virtual host URL. Here is an examination of the problem and a workaround. ...

August 18, 2009 · 16 min · shlomo