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EFF Wants to Secure the Web With “HTTPS Now” Campaign
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The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has kicked off a new “HTTPS Now” campaign to educate consumers and help “make web surfing safer.”
The new campaign is a two part effort. First the EFF would like to encourage users to install the HTTPS Everywhere Firefox add-on, which will automatically redirect you to https connections. HTTPS Everywhere makes sure you’re always using a secure connection when you visit Gmail, Twitter and several dozen other sites; you don’t need to worry about checking the URL everytime you login.
While HTTPS Everywhere is a good suggestion for users, the primary thrust of the HTTPS Now campaign is aimed at popular websites. After all, HTTPS Everywhere only works if your favorite sites offer secure connections, and an alarming number of sites do not.
The EFF has partnered with Access, a digital freedom activist group, to create the new HTTPS Now website. The new site will keep track of which sites offer HTTPS connections, how much of the site is secure and whether or not the site mixes secure and insecure content.
Why all the fuss about HTTPS? Well, every time you log in to Twitter, Facebook or any other service that uses 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.
There is a better way, the secure version of HTTP — HTTPS. That extra “S” in the URL means your connection is secure, and it’s much harder for anyone else to see what you’re doing. Think of the extra “S” as the envelop that keeps prying eyes from looking at your postcards.
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 the sites often revert back to using an insecure HTTP connection. That means you’re vulnerable to simple attacks like those made possible by the Firesheep Firefox plugin. Firesheep sniffs network traffic and looks for insecure cookies which it then uses to spoof your login credentials to the site. Firesheep allows other people to quickly and easily become you on the web.
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 and there are also some (minor) costs involved with HTTPS certificates.
But obviously neither cost nor minor speed hits have stopped big sites like Twitter, Facebook, Gmail and Flickr from implementing HTTPS. The EFF would like to encourage other sites to follow suit.
If you’d like to see how your favorite sites fair when it comes to protecting your data from traffic snoops, head on over to the HTTPS Now website.
Photo: Joffley/Flickr/CC
See Also:
- HTTPS Is More Secure, So Why Isn’t the Web Using It?
- Secure Firefox With New HTTPS Everywhere Add-on
- EFF Reveals How Your Digital Fingerprint Makes You Easy to Track
Fri, 22 Apr 2011 15:48:24 GMT
Tags: HTTPS, HTTPS Everwhere, Identity, Security, Web Basics,
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