HTTPS Everywhere 3.0 Secures the Web for Firefox, Chrome Users

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has released version 3.0 of its HTTPS Everywhere browser plugin, which will automatically redirect you to secure, HTTPS connections. HTTPS Everywhere 3.0 adds support for 1,500 more websites, twice as many as previous releases.

Firefox users can install HTTPS Everywhere directly from the EFF site. There’s also an alpha release available for Google’s Chrome web browser. Unfortunately, limited add-on APIs mean that HTTPS Everywhere isn’t available for other web browsers.

Once it’s installed, the HTTPS Everywhere extension makes it easy to ensure you’re connecting to secure sites by rewriting all requests to an HTTPS URL whenever you visit one of the thousands of sites HTTPS Everywhere supports.

Why all the fuss about HTTPS? Well, every time you log in to a website through a plain HTTP connection, you expose your data to the world. It’s a bit like writing your username and password on a postcard and dropping it in the mailbox. Think of an HTTPS connection as an envelope to protect your postcard from prying eyes.

The problem gets a bit more complicated than just HTTPS though. Most sites already use HTTPS to handle your login info — that’s a good first step — but once you’re logged in sites often revert back to using an insecure HTTP connection.

So why doesn’t the entire web use HTTPS all the time? The answer is slightly complicated, but the primary reason is speed. HTTPS can’t be cached on CDN networks, which means pages may load slightly slower than they would over standard, insecure connections. For smaller sites the added costs involved with HTTPS certificates make HTTPS more expensive. However neither of those stumbling blocks have stopped Google, Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia or the thousands of other sites large and small that now offer HTTPS connections.

The EFF is still a long way from its long term goal of encrypting the entire web, but with more sites supporting HTTPS connections every day the web is slowly but surely getting more secure.

Source : webmonkey