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At work, the net admin. has completely blocked HTTPS for everyone save a few bosses. He claims that way he can be sure no-one is using a proxy, tunnel, etc. to access Facebook, Youtube or other sites deemed not-suitable for work.

The whole web is slowly turning to HTTPS by default. Some sites (like Wikipedia) allow me to go thru simply editing the address and removing the "s", others insist in redirecting me - so I'm cut off of a lot of content I could see otherwise.

I appreciate the webmasters caring about my privacy and security, but such efforts are useless if I cannot use their sites at all as a result.

Is there a way to configure Firefox so it indicates to the site that https cannot/should not be used? Or to set up a proxy to navigate those sites?

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  • Perhaps using an HTTP tunnel? If they redirect you from the server side, you can't do anything on the client side (no browser plugins and javascript works)
    – Rápli András
    Commented Mar 9, 2014 at 21:18
  • Have they also blocked SSH? OpenVPN?
    – grawity_u1686
    Commented Mar 9, 2014 at 21:24
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    Talk to your it department. We have a squid proxy set up to block https unless the web browser has the proxy server entered. We can see the requests, which is all we care about
    – Canadian Luke
    Commented Mar 9, 2014 at 22:00
  • Simply stated. You can't. If Facebook configures it website to only accept https there is nothing you can do about it.
    – Ramhound
    Commented Mar 9, 2014 at 22:09
  • Note that you can possibly get a FireFox extension to try HTTP instead, but any answer here suggesting a proxy or VPN solution is likely against your company 'Acceptable Use Policy' and you risk some kind of punishment all the way up to losing your job if found out, depending on company strictness. The 'right' answer is to demonstrate to management that this is too strict and stopping your ability to work, or to adequately protect company information, and they can get the net admin to remove the restrictions and/or buy a proper web filter system that can deal with HTTPS as well.
    – TessellatingHeckler
    Commented Mar 9, 2014 at 22:44

1 Answer 1

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I don't see why hes blocked for the reasons hes given as

  1. Proxy's rely on http
  2. HTTPS is only for web traffic and not much else not vpns as vpns rely on completely different ports

I suggest talking to this net admin who is obviously not very experienced and request that he unblocks port 443 on the grounds of:

  • Removing https reduces the security of any request to the https site. The most vital being financial transaction or logins to websites.

I'm not sure why removing the https port will help anything if it's set up properly.

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  • the admin possibly wants to track the content that the users are browsing
    – mvark
    Commented Mar 10, 2014 at 3:47
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    @mvark he can do that with out blocking https
    – Ioan Loosley
    Commented Mar 15, 2014 at 14:03
  • @mvark if this is still a issue after all this time, the admin could generate a selfsigned CA and make SSL certs on the fly and not risk security problems
    – Ioan Loosley
    Commented Mar 6, 2016 at 18:03

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