PKI Consortium blog

Trust on the Public Web – The Consequences of Covert Action
November 11, 2016 by Dean Coclin Apple Chrome Firefox Mis-issued Mozilla SSL/TLS

You may have heard in the news that the Chinese Certificate Authority, WoSign, was caught backdating SHA-1 certificates to make it look like they were issued before the December 31, 2015 deadline. Why is this newsworthy?  For web-based security to remain an integral part of an ecosystem used every day by millions of people around the world, it all comes down to Trust; trust in the organization issuing the certificates, trust in the browsers that validate and display certificate information to the user, and trust by relying parties browsing web pages secured by certificates. Without trust, worldwide commerce and security on the web are at risk.

Google Certificate Transparency (CT) to Expand to All Certificates Types
November 8, 2016 by Jeremy Rowley Announcement CA/Browser Forum Chrome DV EV Google IETF OV Policy SSL/TLS

The policy change goes into effect October 2017

A recent Google announcement stated that all publicly trusted SSL/TLS certificates issued in October 2017 or later will be expected to comply with Chrome’s Certificate Transparency (CT) policy or be untrusted by the browser.

HTTP/2 Update
October 26, 2016 by Wayne Thayer Google SSL/TLS

I wrote about the next version of the HTTP protocol 18 months ago. Since then, HTTP/2 has gained significant traction, but not without generating some controversy along the way.

Performance

Perhaps the biggest question lingering over HTTP/2 relates to real-world performance benefits. A demonstration comparing the time it takes to load a website over HTTP/1.1 without SSL/TLS versus HTTP/2 (which only works in browsers over HTTPS) has been criticized for being unrealistic. It loads 360 unique images, a scenario that highlights the strengths of HTTP/2’s new design. The criticism comes from the fact that the average web page only loads around 100 objects (images, style sheets, etc.), and is often optimized for HTTP/1.1 using techniques that reduce the effectiveness of the HTTP/2 mechanisms.

Why Is Certificate Expiration Necessary?
October 19, 2016 by Bruce Morton (Entrust) Attack CA/Browser Forum EV Hash Function Identity OCSP Policy RSA SSL/TLS Vulnerability

The Long Life Certificate – Why It Doesn’t Exist

Why is certificate expiration even necessary? Wouldn’t it be better if I could just buy a certificate with a long life before expiration? It would really simplify certificate management if it could be installed and forgotten. Simple, no management required, just file-and-forget.

Always-On SSL
September 30, 2016 by Rick Andrews, Ben Wilson Encryption Firefox Google Identity Microsoft Mixed Content OpenSSL Policy Qualified SSL/TLS

There is no doubt that content owners and publishers have a duty to encourage trust and the confidence during internet usage by adopting security best practices. If a customer believes that their data and identity are safe and protected, they are more inclined to continue their online transactions. Industry best practices for website protection should be vendor-neutral, easy to implement, and globally accessible. Websites should take all the reasonable steps possible to adopt best practices in secure design and implementation, and this includes using Always-On SSL across the entire website.

Chrome to Show HTTP Sites as Not Secure
September 15, 2016 by Bruce Morton (Entrust) Chrome Google HSTS SSL/TLS Vulnerability

Always-On SSL should be deployed to prevent the “Not secure” warning

Website owners who do not secure their website with an SSL/TLS certificate will have to rethink their online strategy.  In a push to make the Internet safer for all users, Google will soon be issuing a stronger warning to visitors who navigate to a website that does not have the protection of an SSL/TLS certificate.

How a SWEET32 Birthday Attack is Deployed and How to Prevent It
September 7, 2016 by Bruce Morton (Entrust) 3DES Attack Encryption RC4 SSH SSL/TLS TLS 1.0

Details surrounding the SWEET32: Birthday attacks on 64-bit block ciphers in TLS and OpenVPN can be found in the paper released by Karthikeyan Bhargavan and Gaëtan Leurent from INRIA in France. The paper shows that cipher suites using 64-bit block length ciphers are vulnerable to plaintext recovery attacks. As such, Triple-DES (3DES) and Blowfish are vulnerable. Here’s an overview.

Vulnerabilities to a SWEET32 Birthday Attack

Certain scenarios are pre-disposed to a SWEET32 Birthday attack. For HTTPS, most susceptible are websites that support the 3DES algorithm and sustain long lived connections.

Trust Indication Change in Google Chrome
August 24, 2016 by Bruce Morton (Entrust) Chrome EV Google ISO SSL/TLS

Google is making security icon changes in the Chrome status bar. The changes are based on a research paper prepared by members of Google and University of California, Berkeley. The research evaluated forty icons, seven complementary strings and surveyed 1,329 people.

The goal is to make it easier for browser users to determine how secure their connection to a site is and indicate if the site is dangerous or deceptive. In addition, the icons are to indicate to people that HTTP is less secure than HTTPS. Below are representations of the old icons and the selected new icons which are to be used in Chrome.

TLS Certificates on the Web – The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
May 17, 2016 by Rick Andrews CA/Browser Forum Code Signing ECC Encryption EV Hash Function PKI Policy RSA SSL/TLS

It might be hard to believe, but the SSL/TLS Ecosystem is nearly 20 years old. It’s time to take stock and see how we’re doing with regards to TLS certificates. In this article, we’ll primarily discuss certificates themselves and not web server configuration, although that is often a source of problems.

In the last few years, we’ve endured three major certificate-based migrations:

• Away from the MD2 and MD5 hash algorithms to SHA-1
• Away from small RSA keys to 2048-bit keys or larger
• Away from the SHA-1 hash algorithm to SHA-256

What’s driving these migrations? Primarily, it’s the relentless march of attacks. As Bruce Schneier says, “Attacks always get better; they never get worse.” To stay ahead of these attacks, Certification Authorities and browser vendors joined together several years ago to form the CA/Browser Forum, and published several requirements documents: the Baseline Requirements, the EV SSL Guidelines and the EV Code Signing Requirements.

What Kind of SSL/TLS Certificate do You Need?
May 12, 2016 by Ben Wilson DV EV SSL/TLS

In previous blog posts we have discussed the differences among the various types of SSL/TLS certificates available. In this blog post we introduce you to a new infographic that has a decision tree to help you select the right kind of certificate for your needs.  In most cases you will need a publicly trusted certificate, but the decision tree notes that one type of certificate is the private trust certificate, which can be obtained and used in situations where a publicly trusted certificate cannot be used. These types of private SSL/TLS certificates chain to a root certificate that is not embedded in the key stores of browsers and other similar software, but apart from that branch, the decision tree is an aid to server administrators looking to buy one or more publicly trusted SSL/TLS certificates.