Twitter Joins the HTTPS By Default Party

wiredmikey writes "Following a trend in allowing users to automatically utilize the secure HTTPS protocol when accessing Web based services, Twitter announced this week that it has added the option for users to force HTTPS connections by default when accessing Twitter.com. The reasons to utilize HTTPS when accessing any personal accounts aren't new, but an easy to use extension for FireFox called 'FireSheep,' released in October 2010, spiked concern, as it enables HTTP session hijacking for the masses."

Comments

Good

[Tukz]

I''d like to see all community sites do that.

I got an addon that tries to force SSL where available, and it's surprising so many sites that doesn't have SSL enabled at all.

What's the penalty for HTTPS?

[Compaqt]

Back some years ago, there was talk about dedicated SSL hardware. What's the performance penalty for HTTPS anymore?

Say you're a small startup running your "the next Twitter" app on a Xen or OpenVZ VPS instance.

What's the hit for HTTPS?

Any thoughts on HTTPS only for the login page, or for all pages?

Re:What's the penalty for HTTPS?

[buchner.johannes]

Any thoughts on HTTPS only for the login page, or for all pages?

You can just steal the session cookie after login, so just doing the login page is almost useless. It prevents the attacker from learning the password and re-entering the system, but a) he can change the password and b) there is no reason he wouldn't get the job done within one session.

Re:What's the penalty for HTTPS?

[hart]

There's still a performance hit for SSL. Solutions for that include load balancers with dedicated hardware SSL support. As for what the performance hit is, try this: http://serverfault.com/questions/43692/how-much-of-a-performance-hit-for-https-vs-http-for-apache Re: HTTPS all vs. only on login page - as the recent Facebook session hijacking proved, it's the session cookies in cleartext that are the security problem - it doesn't sniff your password, it steals your session cookies to access your account. HTTPs should be on everything, IMHO. Cheers Leigh

Re:What's the penalty for HTTPS?

[Baloo Uriza]

Most sites expect you to enter the current password to be able to change it, even if you are logged in.

Re:What's the penalty for HTTPS?

[shish]

Speaking as someone in exactly the situation you describe -- running our current site on a small single-core VPS, over HTTP we can serve ~400 static files per second, limited by bandwidth. Using HTTPS, we can serve 10 static files per second, limited by CPU speed. For dynamic pages, the limits are more like 50/sec (limited by CPU) and 5/sec (limited by CPU -- page load times go up a lot as the database and processing are competing with the encryption)

Current plan to deal with this, because we want to be HTTPS by default, is to offload static files to an HTTPS-enabled CDN, and have a front-end reverse proxy or several dedicated to SSL processing -- unless anyone has any better ideas?

Good start, but install HTTPS everywhere

[Enry]

I don't like keeping track of what sites I can and can't use HTTPS on, so I installed HTTPS Everywhere on my browsers and get HTTPS access to a bunch of sites by default.

BTW, when do we get HTTPS access to /.?

Re:Good start, but install HTTPS everywhere

[Even on Slashdot FOE]

When someone hacks CmdrTaco's account and posts something embarrassing using his name. I mean embarrassing enough we can tell it wasn't him, of course.

This may be difficult, to be honest.

Re:Good start, but install HTTPS everywhere

[ftobin]

Slashdot has HTTPS access if you are a paying subscriber.

It is built in to Firefox 4

[Chrisq]

It is built in to Firefox 4 so soon you won't need an extension.

Re:It is built in to Firefox 4

[Chrisq]

From what I am understanding of the article its there to stop:

http://www.example..../ [redirect to] https://..../

Which could be grounds for a Man In The Middle Attack. It does not say anything about forcing people to use HTTPS, just that it will be done automatically instead of using a redirect. So it'll make sites which force HTTPS safer, but it won't force twitter to push https if you haven't asked for it.

There is a better explanation here. Basically after the header is received the browser will convert any http: requests to https:, therefore bypassing any redirect. Whether this will force you to use https depends on whether Twitter will set this header on their https sites only or on both http and https. Even if they do set it only on the https site it will force you to use https if you visit the https URL even once.

Re:Bad idea!

[CastrTroy]

Twitter isn't carrying important personal data

Tell that to the people in Libya, China, North Korea (do they have internet?) and other places around the world where the government isn't so easy on people who oppose the regime.