Apr 22, 2011 12:28 GMT  ·  By

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), one of the leading digital rights watchdogs, has launched, together with the Access, a campaign called "HTTPS Now" which raises awareness about the benefits of HTTPS and encourages its adoption.

HTTPS (HTTP Secure) combines the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) with Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)/Transport Layer Security (TLS) in order to encrypt traffic between websites and users.

"We've heard a lot about how malicious tools like Firesheep can be used to steal data, including passwords for email and social networking accounts," said EFF Activist Eva Galperin.

"HTTPS Now is aimed at protecting users from attacks like these by spreading the word about HTTPS and how to use it correctly," she explained.

The campaign will extend in three directions, providing users with tools to make HTTPS use easier, gauging the level of HTTPS adoption on the Web and helping website owners implement the technology.

Resources and a growing list of sites on which HTTPS implementation has been tested based on several criteria are available on the campaign's website at httpsnow.org.

For example, Google, which has spearheaded HTTPS adoption for mainstream non-financial services, doesn't support HTTPS for all pages under its google.com domain name, doesn't use only secure cookies and doesn't enforce HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS).

Nevertheless, Google's implementation is more complete than Facebook's, which still has problems with mixed content that break the secure chain. This is caused by the many third-party apps that don't yet support HTTPS.

Sites like Facebook, Twitter and Hotmail offer always-on HTTPS settings that can be enabled by users under their accounts. Google on the other hand enables HTTPS by default on some services like Gmail or Docs.

The EFF offers a Mozilla Firefox extension called HTTPS Everywhere, developed in collaboration with the TOR Project and capable of enforcing HTTPS connections on a large number of popular websites that support it.