SSL

Back in July last year, Scott Helme and I shipped a little pet project that tracked the world's largest websites not implementing HTTPS by default. We called it Why No HTTPS? and it gave people a way to see the largest websites not taking transport layer security seriously. We also broke the list down on a country-by-country basis and it quickly became a means of highlighting security gaps and serving as a "list of shame". I've had many organisations reach out and ask to be removed once they'd done their TLS things properly so clearly, the site is driving the right behaviour. Today, we're happy to share the first update since November last year. The Web is More Secure More...

We're pretty much at a "secure by default" internet these days, at least that's the assumption with most websites, particularly so in the financial sector. About 80% of all web pages are loaded over an HTTPS connection, browsers are increasingly naggy when anything isn't HTTPS and it's never been cheaper nor easier to HTTPS all your things. Which meant that this rather surprised me: Let me break down what's happening here: I'm in (yet another) hotel and on complete autopilot, I start typing "xer" into the address bar which Chrome then dutifully auto-completes for me: Because it's hotel wifi I expect it to be slow, so I flick over to another tab to do other useful things before switching back...

Almost one year ago now, I declared extended validation certificates dead. The entity name had just been removed from Safari on iOS, it was about to be removed from Safari on Mojave and there were indications that Chrome would remove it from the desktop in the future (they already weren't displaying it on mobile clients). The only proponents of EV seemed to be those selling it or those who didn't understand how reliance on the absence of a positive visual indicator was simply never a good idea in the first place. The writing might have been on the wall a year ago, but the death warrant is now well and truly inked with both Chrome and Firefox killing it stone...

Sometimes the discussion around extended validation certificates (EV) feels a little like flogging a dead horse. In fact, it was only September that I proposed EV certificates are already dead for all sorts of good reasons that have only been reinforced since that time. Yet somehow, the discussion does seem to come up time and again as it did following this recent tweet of mine: Always find comments like this amusing: “The main concern about SSL certificates is that all of them are losing their intrinsic trust” Yet an excluded purpose for certs is: “That it is safe to do business with the Subject named in the EV Cert”https://t.co/slZVzqGLfN https://t.co/7FSbBHjj1l — Troy Hunt...

That's it - I'm calling it - extended validation certificates are dead. Sure, you can still buy them (and there are companies out there that would just love to sell them to you!), but their usefulness has now descended from "barely there" to "as good as non-existent". This change has come via a combination of factors including increasing use of mobile devices, removal of the EV visual indicator by browser vendors and as of today, removal from Safari on iOS (it'll also be gone in Mac OS Mojave when it lands next week): I chose Comodo's website to illustrate this change as I was reminded of the desperation involved in selling EV just last month when...

So that little project Scott Helme and I took on - WhyNoHTTPS.com - seems to have garnered quite a bit of attention. We had about 81k visitors drop by on the first day and for the most part, the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. Most people have said it's great to have the data surfaced publicly and they've used that list to put some pressure on sites to up their game. We're already seeing some sites on the Day 1 list go HTTPS (although frankly, if the site is that large and they've done it that quickly then I doubt it's because of our list), and really, that's the best possible outcome of this project - seeing websites drop...

As of today, Google begins shipping Chrome 68 which flags all sites served over the HTTP scheme as being "not secure". This is because the connection is, well, not secure so it seems like a fairly reasonable thing to say! We've known this has been coming for a long time now both through observing the changes in the industry and Google specifically saying "this is coming". Yet somehow, we've arrived at today with a sizable chunk of the web still serving traffic insecurely: The majority of the Internet’s top 1M most popular sites will show up as “Not Secure” in @GoogleChrome starting July 24th. Make sure your site redirects to #HTTPS, so you don’t...

It was Jan last year that I suggested HTTPS adoption had passed the "tipping point", that is, it had passed the moment of critical mass and as I said at the time, "will very shortly become the norm". Since that time, the percentage of web pages loaded over a secure connection has rocketed from 52% to 71% whilst the proportion of the world's top 1 million websites redirecting people to HTTPS has gone from 20% to about half (projected). The rapid adoption has been driven by a combination of ever more visible browser warnings (it was Chrome and Firefox's changes which prompted the aforementioned tipping point post), more easily accessible certificates via both Let's Encrypt and...

HTTPS is easy! In fact, it's so easy I decided to create 4 short videos around 5 minutes each to show people how to enable HTTPS on their site and get all traffic redirecting securely, optimise their HTTPS configuration to get it rating higher than most banks, fix any insecure references in a few clicks and finally, secure all the traffic all the way back to their website. I built a little demo site and embedded all the videos in it over at HTTPSIsEasy.com. Let me begin by being clear about the demographic this is pitched at: I wanted to create a resource that had the broadest possible appeal regardless of technical competency. If someone has entry-level web dev...

Occasionally, I feel like I'm just handing an organisation more shovels - "here, keep digging, I'm sure this'll work out just fine..." The latest such event was with NatWest (a bank in the UK), and it culminated with this tweet from them: I'm sorry you feel this way. I can certainly pass on your concerns and feed this back to the tech team for you Troy? DC — NatWest (@NatWest_Help) December 12, 2017 This was after a concerned customer and then myself trying to explain to them that serving their home page over a non-secure connection wasn't such a good idea. The "I'm sorry you feel this way" tweet was in response to...