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EFF: Encrypt the Web with HTTPS Everywhere
Electronic Frontier Foundation Media Release For Immediate Release: Thursday, August 04, 2011 Contact: Peter Eckersley Senior Staff Technologist Electronic Frontier Foundation pde@eff.org +1 415 436-9333 x131 Seth Schoen Senior Staff Technologist Electronic Frontier Foundation seth@eff.org +1 415 436-9333 x107 Encrypt the Web with HTTPS Everywhere Firefox Extension Defends Against Search Hijacking Schemes and Improves Web Security San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), in collaboration with the Tor Project, has launched an official 1.0 version of HTTPS Everywhere, a tool for the Firefox web browser that helps secure web browsing by encrypting connections to more than 1,000 websites. HTTPS Everywhere was first released as a beta test version in June of 2010. Today's 1.0 version includes support for hundreds of additional websites, using carefully crafted rules to switch from HTTP to HTTPS. HTTPS protects against numerous Internet security and privacy problems, including the search hijacking on U.S. networks that was revealed by an article published today in New Scientist magazine. The article, entitled "US internet providers hijacking users' search queries," documents how a company called Paxfire has been intercepting and altering search traffic on a number of ISPs' networks. HTTPS can prevent such attacks. "HTTPS secures web browsing by encrypting both requests from your browser to websites and the resulting pages that are displayed," said EFF Senior Staff Technologist Peter Eckersley. "Without HTTPS, your online reading habits and activities are vulnerable to eavesdropping, and your accounts are vulnerable to hijacking. Today's Paxfire revelations are a grand example of how things can go wrong. EFF created HTTPS Everywhere to make it easier for people to keep their user names, passwords, and browsing histories secure and private. With the revelation that companies like Paxfire are out there, intercepting millions of people's searches without their permission, this kind of protection is indispensable." HTTPS Everywhere 1.0 encrypts connections to Google Image Search, Flickr, Netflix, Apple, and news sites like NPR and the Economist, as well as dozens of banks. HTTPS Everywhere also includes support for Google Search, Facebook, Twitter, Hotmail, Wikipedia, the New York Times, and hundreds of other popular websites. However, many websites have not implemented HTTPS at all. On sites that are HTTP-only, users still have to live with lower levels of privacy and security. "More websites should implement HTTPS to help protect their users from identity theft, viruses, and other security threats," said Senior Staff Technologist Seth Schoen. "Our Firefox extension is able to protect people using Google, DuckDuckGo or StartingPage for their searches. But we currently can't protect Bing and Yahoo users, because those search engines do not support HTTPS." HTTPS Everywhere has been downloaded millions of times since last year's initial beta release. To download HTTPS Everywhere for Firefox: https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere For more on implementing HTTPS in websites: https://www.eff.org/pages/how-deploy-https-correctly For this release: https://www.eff.org/press/archives/2011/08/04 About EFF The Electronic Frontier Foundation is the leading civil liberties organization working to protect rights in the digital world. Founded in 1990, EFF actively encourages and challenges industry and government to support free expression and privacy online. EFF is a member-supported organization and maintains one of the most linked-to websites in the world at https://www.eff.org/ -end- _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe or manage your email options: https://mail1.eff.org/mailman/listinfo/presslist (Log in to post comments)
EFF: Encrypt the Web with HTTPS Everywhere Posted Aug 5, 2011 19:12 UTC (Fri) by Wummel (subscriber, #7591) [Link] No cake for Google Chrome users. The EFF says about the KB SSL enforcer:<quote> but it does not appear to be implemented securely; when we tested it, it seemed to always use http before https, which means that your surfing habits and authentication cookies are not protected (this may be a limitation of the Chrome Extensions framework). </quote> Well, I'll try it anyway.
EFF: Encrypt the Web with HTTPS Everywhere Posted Aug 5, 2011 20:43 UTC (Fri) by dtlin (✭ supporter ✭, #36537) [Link] You can always use Chrome's HSTS support to force HTTPS on a domain. chrome://net-internals/#hsts
EFF: Encrypt the Web with HTTPS Everywhere Posted Aug 5, 2011 21:09 UTC (Fri) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link]
That requires support from the site; this doesn't.
EFF: Encrypt the Web with HTTPS Everywhere Posted Aug 6, 2011 3:54 UTC (Sat) by AnthonyJBentley (subscriber, #71227) [Link]
No, Chrome lets you force HSTS even for sites that dont send the relevant headers.
That said, it might not work for all cases that HTTPS Everywhere supports. For instance, the secure Wikipedia is at secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/, not en.wikipedia.org, and I doubt HSTS would do the required automatic remapping.
EFF: Encrypt the Web with HTTPS Everywhere Posted Aug 5, 2011 21:27 UTC (Fri) by dwmw2 (subscriber, #2063) [Link] This is mostly incompatible with the captive portals in hotels and airports, right? If we move to HTTPS everywhere, those login pages will never show up; the network will just not work?
EFF: Encrypt the Web with HTTPS Everywhere Posted Aug 5, 2011 21:58 UTC (Fri) by cry_regarder (subscriber, #50545) [Link]
So just go to a makebelieve site so you get the hotel portal site. Then other stuff will load.
EFF: Encrypt the Web with HTTPS Everywhere Posted Aug 5, 2011 22:04 UTC (Fri) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]
They're doomed -- any well-meaning, or even greedy but harmless use of MitM techniques is doomed when bad guys use MitM attacks and force the use of countermeasures.
I imagine that somebody will make a few bucks fixing this, if we're lucky they'll fix it in a way that actually makes some kind of sense.
For example presumably devices are doing DHCP to get an IPv4 address to communicate with these dubious wireless networks, DHCP is extensible, adding a field for "URL of site you should visit if you need additional credentials to make use of this connection" shouldn't be beyond the wit of man.
In fact for all I know all this already exists.
EFF: Encrypt the Web with HTTPS Everywhere Posted Aug 5, 2011 23:13 UTC (Fri) by cesarb (subscriber, #6266) [Link]
Another way would be to have a standard address to be hijacked. IIRC, some domestic routers hijack a specific address (which is owned by the manufacturer) to point to its built-in configuration page.
But even then, these captive portals are already broken. Both Opera Mini and Opera Mobile can use Opera's servers as an encrypted, authenticated and compressed proxy. AFAIK, Opera Mini requires it (it cannot work without Opera's proxies).
So, if you are using Opera Mini or Opera Mobile, you will not see these captive portals, unless you know they are there and that you have to disable that specific configuration option (and for Opera Mini, even that is not possible). The configuration option's name does not make it obvious that it will break captive portals; it only makes it obvious that it is supposed to make your browsing go faster (at least on Opera Mobile, the option is called "Opera Turbo").
EFF: Encrypt the Web with HTTPS Everywhere Posted Aug 5, 2011 22:58 UTC (Fri) by cesarb (subscriber, #6266) [Link]
It would be great if the old pages in lwn.net worked with it. Compare for instance http://lwn.net/1998/0129/ and https://lwn.net/1998/0129/.
EFF: Encrypt the Web with HTTPS Everywhere Posted Aug 11, 2011 16:15 UTC (Thu) by intgr (subscriber, #39733) [Link]
Already reported: https://mail1.eff.org/pipermail/https-everywhere-rules/20...
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