PKI Consortium blog

2016 – Looking Back, Moving Forward
December 14, 2015 by Bruce Morton (Entrust) Attack CA/Browser Forum CAA Chrome Code Signing DH Encryption Firefox Google Hash Function IETF Microsoft MITM OpenSSL Policy RC4 Revocation RSA SSL/TLS TLS 1.2 TLS 1.3 Vulnerability

Looking Back at 2015

A number of new tactics proved 2015 was no exception to an active year defending against ever increasing security issues. Vendors found new and creative ways to provide vulnerabilities including the now popular man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks.  MitM as well as a host of other new vulnerabilities caused browsers to rethink their security requirements.  This article gives a flashback of the exploits and industry changes from 2015 and looks ahead at the latest security requirements and how it impacts IT security teams.

Perfect Forward Secrecy
April 11, 2014 by Bruce Morton (Entrust), Rick Andrews 3DES DH ECC ECDH Forward Secrecy OpenSSL RC4 RSA SSL/TLS TLS 1.2

Recent revelations from Edward Snowden about pervasive government surveillance have led to many questions about the safety of communications using the SSL/TLS protocol. Such communications are generally safe from eavesdroppers, as long as certain precautions are observed. For example, configuring your web server to avoid using SSL2 and SSL3, favoring newer versions of TLS like TLS 1.2, selecting strong ciphersuites, etc.

But even if your server is configured properly, you still must secure the private key associated with your SSL certificate. In nearly all cases, the web site owner generates their key pair and sends only the public key to their Certification Authority (CA). The CA (and any eavesdropper) sees only the public key, and the private key cannot be derived from that. So the CA cannot reveal a web site owner’s private key to the government or an attacker, even if coerced to do so.

Getting the Most Out of SSL Part 2: Configuration
June 29, 2013 by Ryan Hurst Attack CASC DH Forward Secrecy OpenSSL PKI RC4 RSA SSL/TLS TLS 1.0 TLS 1.2 Vulnerability

They say the most complicated skill is to be simple; despite SSL and HTTPS having been around for a long time, they still are not as simple as they could be.

One of the reasons for this is that the security industry is constantly learning more about how to design and build secure systems; as a result, the protocols and software used to secure online services need to continuously evolve to keep up with the latest risks.