SSL Enforcer forces secure connections on a system-wide level

SSL Enforcer is a new program that is currently available as a free beta version. If other programs of the same developer are anything to go by, it is likely that it won't be available for free after the beta period.

The program works similar to the popular browser extension HTTPS Everywhere but with the difference that it runs independent from any program on the system.

This means that it can enforce secure connections for all processes running on the system.

The application is available as a portable version and installer. The SSL enforcement is enabled by default when you run it and you may run into issues when connecting to servers on the Internet on HTTP ports because of this since sites may not support HTTPS at all.

The program monitors HTTP ports, 80, 8080 and several others by default and to redirect to a secure connection. This works in all web browsers but also other programs that use HTTP connections including RSS readers for example.

All actions are echoed in the log so that you can always check to see what is going on. There are options to display even more information in the log, limit what is being displayed to errors, or display no log at all.

The settings allow you to turn the SSL enforcement off, disable automatic redirects to HTTPS and HTTPS availability checks.

There you find options to exclude processes or hosts from the procedure. This can be important if a host does not support HTTPS. Instead of not connecting to it at all, you can add it to the list of exceptions to have the program ignore connections to that host or that are made by a process specified there.

The ports that are monitored are also listed here and it is possible to add or remove ports from the list.

The program uses little bandwidth for this as it does not make use of tunnels or proxy servers to enforce https connections.

The main issue that some users, especially business users, will have with the program is that it is not open source. This means that it is not possible to vet it to see if it does not do anything that it should not as it manipulates all HTTP traffic.

Good news is that its redirection to secure connections works really well provided that the host supports https connections.

SSL Enforcer is available for Windows and Mac.