New Firefox Extension to Forces HTTPS Sessions

HTTPS Everywhere is a Firefox extension developed by The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), one of the leading online privacy groups, together with the Tor Project,, which automatically forces HTTPS connections for several major sites that support it. The Firefox add-on is know as HTTPS Everywhere, the add-on allows users to add support for other websites as well by defining custom rulesets. 

Many sites on the web offer some limited support for encryption over HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure), 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. HTTPS connections are encrypted via the SSL/TLS, in order to prevent third parties from reading the data. Using this protocol is a must when browsing from public wireless networks or other environments, where Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attacks are easy to mount.

HTTPS is most commonly used on websites that require secure transactions, such as e-commerce or online banking portals. However, in the past two years, the protocol has begun to see implementation for even the most common browsing tasks such as webmail sessions or even Web search.
 
For some websites you can easily do this by adding 's' with 'http' but the problem is that some websites use entirely different URLs for their HTTPS version. For example, Wikipedia's regular http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Term URL structure has an https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Term correspondent for HTTPS. The extension solves this issue by using special rewrite rules, which support JavaScript regular expressions, as well as exclusions. 
 
HTTPS Everywhere currently supports Google Search, Google Services, Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, PayPal, The Washington Post, The New York Times, EFF, Mozilla, Identica, The Tor Project,  Duck Duck Go, Ixquick, Scroogle, GentooBugzilla, and Noisebridge. If you'd like to write your own rule set, you can find out how to do that here.

Download HTTPS Everywhere 0.1.2 for Firefox: 
HTTPS Everywhere.xpi (41.4 KB)