Secure Your Browsing with EFF’s “HTTPS Everywhere” Firefox Extension

As useful as the Internet clearly is, connecting to it opens up a massive can of worms where personal security is concerned. With everything from malware to viruses to other forms of vulnerability exploits, there’s a lot to consider when trying to improve your PC’s security and personal habits. For bank transactions and other secure portals, a secure HTTP protocol is often used, and while its overall Web use has been mostly limited to really important data transactions, it’s starting to gain some ground elsewhere as well.

A couple of months ago, Google launched a special version of its search engine that handles all queries searched for in a secure fashion. That means that if people are sniffing your Web traffic, either internally or externally, they will be unable to see exactly what you’re searching for. It turns out that the folks at the EFF were rather impressed by this nifty service that it decided to create a Firefox extension to expand the functionality to other places around the Web as well.

Called “HTTPS Everywhere”, this extension will automatically enable a secure HTTP connection if the website is defined, and of course if it supports it. Most sites do not, but some do, such as EFF itself, Twitter, PayPal, Facebook, Mozilla, Wikipedia and more. If a site is not defined in the plugin itself, you’re able to define your own. It would be neat if the plugin could automatically ping an https protocol to see if one exists on a given site, but that would surely result in a lot of needless pings on the remote side given that the success would be low.

Either way, the ability to utilize secure portals for a lot of websites without doing anything makes HTTPS Everywhere a great addition to your Firefox install. I installed it over the weekend and plan to use going forward, as my initial impressions are quite good.

HTTPS Everywhere is a Firefox extension produced as a collaboration between The Tor Project and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. It encrypts your communications with a number of major websites. Many sites on the web offer some limited support for encryption over HTTPS, but make it difficult to use. For instance, they may default to unencrypted HTTP, or fill encrypted pages with links that go back to the unencrypted site. The HTTPS Everywhere extension fixes these problems by rewriting all requests to these sites to HTTPS.