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VTUL / vtechworks

DSpace at Virginia Tech
http://vtechworks.lib.vt.edu
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Consider changing Handles from HTTP to HTTPS #757

Closed alawvt closed 3 years ago

alawvt commented 3 years ago

Our Handles are currently http://hdl.handle.net/10919/.....

There have been occasional discussions on the DSpace listservs about changing the Handle prefix to HTTPS, Change handle server assignment: default to https and http and https in handle.

alawvt commented 3 years ago

The URL is going to CNRI's handle server and needs to be responded to correctly by the proxy server. According to the Handle.Net Registry Documentation,

"CNRI runs a proxy server system described at http://hdl.handle.net. The proxy service is provided by a collection of servers that accept URL requests and know how to talk to the Handle System. A request of the form http://hdl.handle.net/ returns entries of the type URL from the handle record for handleX. Documentation covers resolving handles using the proxy server system, encoding handles for use in URIs, proxy server query parameters, and the proxy server REST API."

If I substitute HTTPS for HTTP in one of our Handles, e.g. https://hdl.handle.net/10919/104462 for http://hdl.handle.net/10919/104462, CNRI does return https://vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/handle/10919/104462, as it does for HTTP. However, I would guess this is the result of redirection and not HTTPS being used.

Digital Object Architecture and the Handle System, page 35, does include HTTPS in the list of protocols for Handles, which makes sense, since DOI is a type of Handle and DOIs specify HTTPS. But since the CNRI hdl.net proxy server description only mentions HTTP, it is unclear if changing the URL to HTTPS would have any benefit.