PKI Consortium blog

The CA Security Council Looks Ahead to 2020 and Beyond
January 9, 2020 by Patrick Nohe (GlobalSign), Doug Beattie (GlobalSign) Apple CA/Browser Forum Chrome Edge Encryption EV Firefox Forward Secrecy GDPR Google Identity Microsoft Mozilla PKI Policy Qualified SSL 3.0 SSL/TLS TLS 1.0 TLS 1.1 TLS 1.2 TLS 1.3 Web PKI

A whirlwind of activity will cause dramatic shifts across the PKI world in the year ahead

Suffice it to say that 2019 was filled with challenges and contentiousness as Certificate Authorities and Browsers began to watch their shared visions diverge. The debate around Extended Validation continued as CAs pushed for a range of reforms and browsers pushed to strip its visual indicators. And a ballot to shorten maximum certificate validity periods exposed fault-lines at the CAB Forum.

2019 – Looking Back, Moving Forward
January 3, 2019 by Bruce Morton (Entrust) Attack CA/Browser Forum Certificate Expiry Chrome Code Signing DV ECC EV Forward Secrecy Identity Mis-issued Phishing PKI Policy Qualified Revocation RSA SSL/TLS TLS 1.0 TLS 1.3 Vulnerability

Looking Back at 2018

2018 was an active year for SSL/TLS. We saw the SSL/TLS certificate validity period drop to 825-days and the mass deployment of Certificate Transparency (CT). TLS 1.3 protocol was finally completed and published; and Chrome status bar security indicators changing to remove “secure” and to concentrate on “not secure.” The CA/Browser Forum has been reformed, the London Protocol was announced and the nearly full distrust of Symantec SSL completed. Here are some details on some of the 2018 happenings in the SSL/TLS ecosystem.

CA Security Council (CASC) 2019 Predictions: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
December 6, 2018 by Bruce Morton (Entrust), Chris Bailey (Entrust), Jay Schiavo (Entrust) Apple Attack CASC Chrome DV Encryption EV Firefox Google Identity IETF Malware Microsoft Phishing SSL/TLS TLS 1.0 TLS 1.2 TLS 1.3

As the legendary coach of the NY Yankees Yogi Berra allegedly said, “It’s difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.”  But we’re going to try.

Here are the CA Security Council (CASC) 2019 Predictions: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

The Good

Prediction: By the end of 2019, over 90% of the world’s http traffic will be secured over SSL/TLS

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.

2015 – Looking Back, Moving Forward
January 6, 2015 by Bruce Morton (Entrust) Apple Attack CA/Browser Forum CAA Chrome Code Signing EV Firefox Forward Secrecy Google IETF Malware Microsoft MITM Mozilla OpenSSL PKI Policy RSA SHA1 SSL 3.0 SSL/TLS TLS 1.0 TLS 1.2 TLS 1.3 Vulnerability

Looking Back at 2014

End of 1024-Bit Security

In 2014, the SSL industry moved to issuing a minimum security of 2048-bit RSA certificates. Keys smaller than 2048 are no longer allowed in server certificates. In addition, Microsoft and Mozilla started to remove 1024-bit roots from their certificate stores. Hopefully, the key size change will support users through to 2030.

A Follow-up on POODLE and SSL 3.0
November 21, 2014 by Bruce Morton (Entrust) Attack Encryption Google IETF Mozilla OpenSSL SSL 3.0 SSL/TLS TLS 1.0 TLS 1.1 TLS 1.3 Vulnerability

In October 2014, Google announced POODLE, an SSL 3.0 protocol attack.

To bring you up to speed, the SSL/TLS protocol is the most important and popular security protocol on the Internet. The Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol was developed by Netscape. They quickly moved from SSL 1.0 to 2.0 and finalized with SSL 3.0 in 1996.

This protocol was then picked up by the IETF, who released it under the name of Transport Layer Security (TLS). The IETF released TLS 1.0, 1.1 and 1.2. They are currently working on TLS 1.3.

Heartbleed Bug Vulnerability: Discovery, Impact and Solution
April 9, 2014 by Jeremy Rowley Attack BEAST CASC CSR DTLS Encryption Google OpenSSL SSL/TLS TLS 1.0 TLS 1.1 Vulnerability

On April 7, 2014, a vulnerability in the OpenSSL cryptographic library was announced to the Internet community. Aptly labeled as the Heartbleed bug, this vulnerability affects OpenSSL versions 1.0.1 through 1.0.1f (inclusive). The Heartbleed bug is not a flaw in the SSL or TLS protocols; rather, it is a flaw in the OpenSSL implementation of the TLS/DTLS heartbeat functionality. The flaw is not related or introduced by publicly trusted certificates and is instead a problem with server software.

It’s Time for TLS 1.2
September 19, 2013 by Wayne Thayer Attack BEAST Chrome Firefox OCSP RC4 SHA2 SSL 3.0 SSL/TLS TLS 1.0 TLS 1.1 TLS 1.2 Vulnerability

In a previous post titled Getting the Most Out of SSL Part 2, we touched on the recommendation that Web servers be configured to prefer Transport Layer Security (TLS) version 1.2. With the planned release of Firefox 24 and recent release of Chrome 29 adding support for TLS 1.2, now is a great time for website administrators to make the switch.

Transport Layer Security was formerly called Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and is the protocol that enables secure “https://” connections to websites. TLS 1.2 was defined 5 years ago in RFC 5246, and TLS 1.1 dates all the way back to RFC 4346 in 2006. Both of these versions are updates to the original standard that fix bugs and problems including vulnerability to cipher block chaining (CBC) such as the BEAST attack that made news in 2011. The authors also added newer cipher suites including a replacement for RC4, a popular cipher that has been shown to be susceptible to attack. In short, enabling TLS 1.2 is like a Windows software update – it fixes potential problems and makes your website more secure.

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.