PKI Consortium blog

2014 – Looking Back, Moving Forward
January 6, 2014 by Bruce Morton (Entrust) Attack BEAST CA/Browser Forum CAA Code Signing ECC Encryption Forward Secrecy HSTS ICANN IETF Microsoft MITM Mozilla PKI Policy RC4 RSA SHA1 SSL/TLS TLS 1.2

Looking Back at 2013

Protocol Attacks

The year started with a couple of SSL/TLS protocol attacks: Lucky Thirteen and RC4 attack. Lucky Thirteen allows the decryption of sensitive information, such as passwords and cookies, when using the CBC-mode cipher suite. Lucky Thirteen can be mitigated by implementing software patches or preferring the cipher suite RC4.

IETF 88 – Pervasive Surveillance
November 26, 2013 by Bruce Morton (Entrust) Attack CRL Encryption Forward Secrecy HSTS IETF PKI Revocation SSL/TLS Vulnerability Web PKI

Internet Surveillance

The big news at IETF 88 in Vancouver was the technical plenary on Hardening the Internet which discussed the issue of pervasive surveillance. Pervasive surveillance is a mass surveillance of an entire or a substantial fraction of a population. The surveillance is usually carried out by government, is not targeted and its occurrence may not be overt. It was noted that pervasive surveillance, of the kind revealed in the Snowden-sourced documents, constitutes a misguided and damaging attack on civic society in general and the Internet in particular.

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.