Encrypt the Web with the HTTPS Everywhere Firefox Extension [telecom]

Encrypt the Web with the HTTPS Everywhere Firefox Extension

Technical Analysis by Peter Eckersley June 17th, 2010

Today EFF and the Tor Project are launching a public beta of a new Firefox extension called HTTPS Everywhere.

This Firefox extension was inspired by the launch of Google's encrypted search option. We wanted a way to ensure that every search our browsers sent was encrypted. At the same time, we were also able to encrypt most or all of the browser's communications with some other sites:

Google Search * Wikipedia * Twitter and Identi.ca * Facebook * EFF and Tor * Ixquick, DuckDuckGo, Scroogle and other small search engines * and lots more!

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***** Moderator's Note *****

I'd like to have a "Darknet" that my friends and I could use to keep everything we do under wraps. The problem is that if too many people switch to encrypted communications, then the NSA will beg Uncle Sam to revive the "Clipper Chip" or similar "back door" decryption capability.

Bill Horne Moderator

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It isn't that difficult for a group to set up point-to-point encrypted VPN tunnels if you *all* have the right equipment, and I think that there are central sites that offer this as well(?) so you each might just need one secure connection into that.

This sort of thing can make a mess of optimum packet routing for general Internet traffic, but that might be a small price to pay for massively increased personal security.

It still takes a lot of CPU power to decrypt data, and with the massive amounts of Internet traffic it may be theoretically possible but not that practical - especially if some agency wants to to a general snoop looking for particular patterns.

The more people that start using encryption the more secure that traffic will be (at least in the short-term).

-- Regards, David.

David Clayton Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Knowledge is a measure of how many answers you have, intelligence is a measure of how many questions you have.