Contributing to HTTPS Everywhere

There is a very simple way to have an impact on privacy and security by contributing to HTTPS Everywhere. It’s a collaboration project between the Tor project and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

Stripped from the project’s webpage:

HTTPS Everywhere is a Firefox, Chrome, and Opera extension that encrypts your communications with many major websites, making your browsing more secure.

Note that HTTPS Everywhere comes pre-installed and pre-enabled with the Tor browser bundle as well. The “many major websites” from the description, practically means that there are rules defined for the websites that support https.

How can you contribute?

While browsing with HTTPS Everywhere enabled, if you see a website that is not on https, try to access it with https. If the website is still functional, then you can very easily add a rule for it. Fork the Github repo and

cd src/chrome/content/rules
./make-trivial-rule <the domain you want to add>

And the default rule set file will be created. For example the trivial rule for di.uoa.gr can be generated by running:

./make-trivial-rule di.uoa.gr

and will look like this:

<ruleset name="National and Kapodistrian University of Athens - Department of Informatics and Telecommunications">
  <target host="di.uoa.gr" />
  <target host="www.di.uoa.gr" />
  <rule from="^http:" to="https:" />
</ruleset>

Open a Pull Request on the repo and that’s it! A very quick way to have quite some impact on enhancing the privacy and security of the many 😉