PKI Consortium blog

Facebook Will Stop Supporting SHA-1 in October
June 8, 2015 by Ben Wilson Announcement SSL/TLS
On June 2, 2015, Facebook announced that it would stop supporting Facebook-connected apps that were signed with SHA-1, as of October 1, 2015. “These changes are part of a broader shift in how browsers and web sites encrypt traffic to protect the contents of online communications. Typically, web browsers use a hash function to create a unique fingerprint for a chunk of data or a message. This fingerprint is then digitally signed to prove that a message has not been altered or tampered with when passing through the various servers and systems between your computer and Facebook’s servers.

Server Name Indication and Fewer IP Addresses
June 2, 2015 by Bruce Morton (Entrust) Attack Chrome MITM SSL/TLS
You have a dilemma. You want to continue to deploy your web service but are running out of IPv4 addresses. You consider deploying multiple virtual servers that will use the same IP address. However, your thought is that you can only have one SSL certificate per IP address. How will you make your service secure? Server Name Indication (SNI) is an extension to the SSL/TLS protocol that allows the browser or client software to indicate which hostname it is attempting to connect.

Practical Steps to Counter the Logjam Attack
May 26, 2015 by Kirk Hall (Entrust) Apple Attack Encryption Google MITM SSL/TLS Vulnerability
Another flaw has been found in the basic encryption algorithms that secure the Internet. This flaw, named the Logjam attack by its discoverers (researchers from various universities and companies), allows an attacker that can carry out man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks to weaken the encryption used in secure connections (such as HTTPS, SSH, and VPNs). In theory, this means that an attacker (with sufficient resources) can break the encryption and read the “secure” traffic.

Why You Should Get Familiar With TLS If You Accept Credit Cards
April 28, 2015 by Billy VanCannon Encryption PDF SSL/TLS Vulnerability
The group that manages the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard quietly announced in February that an imminent update was coming to its payment card and application requirements related to the use of the SSL encryption protocol. Since then, there has been growing concern among merchants about what the changes mean to them. The confusion among retailers generally can be boiled down to two questions: What will the new updates require me to do?

HTTP/2 Is Speedy and Secure
April 20, 2015 by Wayne Thayer Announcement Chrome Firefox Forward Secrecy Google HSTS IETF Microsoft Mozilla SSL/TLS Vulnerability
Since we last wrote about SSL/TLS performance, there has been a lot of activity in the IETF HTTP Working Group, resulting in the February announcement that the next version of HTTP has been approved. This is big news because it means that major SSL/TLS performance improvements are on the way. Background When your browser connects to a website today, it most likely uses the HTTP/1.1 protocol that was defined in 1999 in RFC 2616.

Extended Validation Builds Trust (Infographic)
April 15, 2015 by CA Security Council SSL/TLS
Click on the image above to download a full-size version.

CA Security Council Report: Consumers Don’t Know Much About Security, But They Trust the Padlock and Green Bar When Shopping Online
April 13, 2015 by CA Security Council CASC EV Google Identity SSL/TLS
San Francisco – April 13, 2015 – The CA Security Council (CASC), an advocacy group committed to the advancement of the security of websites and online transactions, today released its 2015 Consumer Trust Survey which found that validation matters. While consumers are confused about some aspects of security, they recognize and trust the security that SSL brings to e-commerce sites. Fifty-three percent of respondents identify the padlock as adding confidence in an e-commerce site, with 42 percent associating the green bar and organization name in the URL with greater safety.

Microsoft Deploys Certificate Reputation
April 9, 2015 by Bruce Morton (Entrust) EV Google Identity Microsoft Mis-issued SSL/TLS
As we have stated previously, website owners have a concern that an attacker can have a certificate issued for their domain name. We now have two systems which will help monitor certificates for domains: Certificate Transparency (CT) and Certificate Reputation. At the start of 2015, most certification authorities (CAs) support CT as requested by Google. CT works for extended validation (EV) SSL certificates and will allow all EV certificates to be monitored.

Fighting the Good Fight for Online Trust
April 2, 2015 by CA Security Council Apple CAA CASC Google HSM Mis-issued MITM Mozilla Policy Root Program SSL/TLS WebTrust
Once again Browsers and Certificate Authorities are in the news over the reported mis-issuance of an SSL server certificate to a google.com domain. Discovered by Google most likely via technology known as key pinning and discussed by Google’s Adam Langley in this blog, a Chinese certificate authority, CNNIC (Chinese Internet Network Information Center), apparently issued an intermediate certificate to an Egyptian company called MCS Holdings. Because the CNNIC root certificate is included in the root store of most major browsers, users would not see any warnings on sites that have certificates issued by CNNIC or MCS Holdings.

My Website’s SSL Certificate is Fine; Why Do Browsers Downgrade the Security Indicators For My Site?
April 1, 2015 by Rick Andrews Attack Chrome Encryption EV IETF RC4 SSL/TLS
All the major browsers provide “security user interface”, meaning visual elements to inform the user of the security of their connection to the web page they’re visiting. Up until now, those interface elements were tied to the use of SSL/TLS certificates served by the web site. For example, if you went to http://www.example.com, no special elements would be displayed, but if you visited https://www.example.com, you would see a lock icon indicating the presence of a trusted SSL/TLS certificate.