How in the Tech

Encrypting your web connections automatically when possible

By Adam Myers ⋅ June 21, 2010 ⋅ Tags: Firefox, Privacy, Security

Recently, the Electronic Frontier Foundation in collaboration with the Tor anonymous routing project released a public beta of their security and privacy conscious Firefox extension. Inspired by Google’s latest SSL encrypted search option, HTTPS Everywhere extends that concept to other websites. Visiting a website known to the extension will automatically switch your browsing session over to an SSL or HTTPS connection.

HTTPS Everywhere, while greatly useful, is not the giant panacea that you might imagine – simply because web sites must be preconfigured for the addon to work it’s magic. It has no discoverability option to determine when an SSL connection is available on a website you are perusing unencrypted. Still, the addon comes preconfigured to support many of the most popular websites including: Google, Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia, or even news sites like NY Times and Washington Post.  For industrious users, there exists a method to create your own matching rule sets so you are free to expand the functionality to any and all sites you choose. The rule sets look for a specified URL address and then rewrite the link to instead traverse over SSL – pretty simple yet genius in the same breath.

Here is an example straight from the EFF howto:

<ruleset name="Twitter">
  <rule from="^http://twitter\.com" to="https://twitter.com"/>
  <rule from="^http://www\.twitter\.com" to="https://twitter.com"/>
</ruleset>

If writing your own customized rule sets sounds a bit too much you’ll be happy to know the addon will be updated by the EFF and Tor, promising wider and wider compatibility – there’s already been one update since I’ve been testing the extension in fact.

Installation is painless; just download and the rest happens automatically. After a quick Firefox reboot, HTTPS Everywhere just works with zero configuration. If, for some reason, you wish to disable a particular site all the SSL redirection is toggled by a simple check-box. Simple – just as I like!

Download HTTPS Everywhere for Firefox