The joint venture between the EFF and the Tor Project provides Firefox users with the ability to search the web via an HTTPS connection, therefore encrypting information exchanged between the user and website. The free plug-in download will not work for all sites, but EFF says that several popular websites will support the extension, including:
- Google search
- Wikipedia
- The New York Times
- The Washington Post
The EFF said that many websites have “limited support for encryption over HTTPS”, but are largely ineffective because the pages contain links to pages on unencrypted sites or default back to HTTP. The plug-in, called HTTPS Everywhere, addresses these issues by having the extension rewrite requests to compatible sites in HTTPS.
"This Firefox extension was inspired by the launch of Google's encrypted search option”, said Peter Eckersley, Senior Staff Technologist with EFF, in a blog posting. “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.”