SSL

As many followers know, I run a workshop titled Hack Yourself First where I spend a couple of days with folks running through all sorts of common security issues and, of course, how to fix them. I must have run it 50 times by now so it's a pretty well-known quantity, but there's one module more than any other that changes at a fierce rate - HTTPS. I was thinking about it just now when considering how to approach this post launching the new course because let's face it, I've got a lot of material focusing on the topic already. But then I started thinking about the rate of change; just since the beginning of last year, here's a bunch...

It seems that there is no limit to human ingenuity when it comes to working around limitations within one's environment. For example, imagine you genuinely wanted to run a device requiring mains power in the centre of your inflatable pool - you're flat out of luck, right? Wrong! Or imagine there's a fire somewhere but the hydrant is on the other side of train tracks and you really want to put that fire out but trains have still gotta run too - what options are you left with? None? Wrong again! Seeing a theme here? Let's extend that into the digital world and we'll talk about HTTPS for a bit. You should use it. No really, if you're not HTTPS'ing...

It's finally time: it's time the pendulum swings further towards the "secure by default" end of the scale than what it ever has before. At least insofar as securing web traffic goes because as of this week's Chrome 62's launch, any website with an input box is now doing this when served over an insecure connection: It's not doing it immediately for everyone, but don't worry, it's coming very soon even if it hasn't yet arrived for you personally and it's going to take many people by surprise. It shouldn't though because we've known it's coming for quite a while now starting with Google's announcement back in April. That was then covered pretty extensively by the tech press...

As best I understand it, one of the most effective SEO things you can do is to repeat all the important words on your site down the bottom of the page. To save it from looking weird, you make the text the same colour as the background so people can't actually see it, but the search engines pick it up. Job done, profit! I think this is the way we did it in 1999. I don't know, I can't recall exactly, but I know I don't know and I'll happily admit to being consciously incompetent in the ways of SEO. But that's cool, I know the things I understand well and those I don't and when I get the latter...

Last week I wrote about how Life Is About to Get a Whole Lot Harder for Websites Without HTTPS. Somewhere in the comments there, the discussion went off on a tangent about commercial CAs, the threat Let's Encrypt poses to them and subsequently, the value (or lack thereof) posed by extended validation (EV) certificates. That discussion boiled over onto Twitter with many vocal opinions from different camps. This post attempts to lay the arguments out in a more cohesive fashion than Twitter permits. But firstly, let's get back to the original blog post which I made due to the fact that come October, Chrome 62 will begin doing this: There are two important things happening here: Any page including a...

In case you haven't noticed, we're on a rapid march towards a "secure by default" web when it comes to protecting traffic. For example, back in Feb this year, 20% of the Alexa Top 1 Million sites were forcing the secure scheme: These figures are from Scott Helme's biannual report and we're looking at a 5-month-old number here. I had a quiet chat with him while writing this piece and apparently that number is now at 28% of the Top 1 Million. Even more impressive is the rate at which it's changing - the chart above shows that it's up 45% in only 6 months! Perhaps even more impressive again is the near 60% of web requests Mozilla...

A Twitterer sent me this a few days ago: .@troyhunt you've got SSL issues in Chrome 58+ on @ASafaWeb pic.twitter.com/qtUiMxV9tW — Jonathan (@Eonasdan) April 13, 2017 Now normally when I get a report about an SSL thing not working (by which we mean TLS, but we say SSL anyway), I jump on over to SSL Labs (see?!) and run a report I can then direct people to. This usually provides emphatic proof that the SSL configuration is fine and they've just got an old client or some funky MitM stuff going on in their local network. However, this time was different: "Grade will be capped to T". Now I didn't immediately realise what...

It's a great time for HTTPS. Actually, there's never been a better time and as each day goes by, we see constant reminders of how important it is. Someone sent me a great example of this just the other day by virtue of a bug that had been lodged with Mozilla: Your notice of insecure password and/or log-in automatically appearing on the log-in for my website, Oil and Gas International is not wanted and was put there without our permission. Please remove it immediately. We have our own security system and it has never been breached in more than 15 years. Your notice is causing concern by our subscribers and is detrimental to our business. If this sounds a...

That's it - I'm calling it - HTTPS adoption has now reached the moment of critical mass where it's gathering enough momentum that it will very shortly become "the norm" rather than the exception it so frequently was in the past. In just the last few months, there's been some really significant things happen that have caused me to make this call, here's why I think we're now at that tipping point. We've already passed the halfway mark for requests served over HTTPS This was one of the first signs that we'd finally hit that tipping point and it came a few months ago: Yesterday, for the first time, @Mozilla telemetry shows more than 50% of page loads...

Last week Google announced some changes to Chrome, specifically that come January 2017, practices like this are going to start resulting is browser warnings: That's just one of many such examples I've called out in the past and frankly, I have about zero sympathy for those who are doing this in the first place so a browser warning is only right. But here's the really interesting bit - that's just the beginning because Google has a plan: a long-term plan to mark all HTTP sites as non-secure I want to show you the significance of this on everyday websites and we can do that today by virtue of jumping into chrome://flags then scrolling down to "Mark non-secure origins...