Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education recently launched a website which lets parents apply to have their child admitted to a government school in 2017. The eMAP online enrolment system website has finally gone live after most of its bugs and glitches were fixed.
A source close to the developments said the server could only take 600 users per second, which caused the system to crash on Monday.
Concerns have been raised over the security of the portal since its launch, with recent complaints stating it doesn’t use a secure HTTP connection to send data to the eMAP’s server.
HTTPS prevents any 3rd party from seeing, recording, or interfering with the content of the user’s session. By offering HTTPS, we allow our security-cognizant users to be 100% confident that no attacker is monitoring or tampering with the contents of their session
Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) is the secure version of HTTP, the protocol over which data is sent between your browser and the website that you are connected to. The ‘S’ at the end of HTTPS stands for ‘Secure’. It means all communications between your browser and the website are encrypted.
While the lack of an encrypted channel for the website does not automatically mean the eMAP has weak security on the databases that store user data, but it does raise worries.
The Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education was asked why it doesn’t have an SSL/TLS certificate installed on its admissions website, but it did not respond by the time of publication.
Web browsers such as Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome also display a padlock icon in the address bar to visually indicate that a HTTPS connection is in effect.
The major benefits of a HTTPS certificate are:
- Customer information, like credit card numbers, is encrypted and cannot be intercepted
- Visitors can verify you are a registered business and that you own the domain
- Customers are more likely to trust and complete purchases from sites that use HTTPS
