SSL

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...

I tweeted this the other day, and the internet was not pleased: HTTPS is slow. No - wait - is it HTTP that's slow?! https://t.co/T49GG7oCaK pic.twitter.com/cfnYOpXMWc— Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) July 8, 2016 In fact, a bunch of the internet was pretty upset. "It's not fair!", they cried. "You're comparing apples and oranges!", they raged. No, it's not fair, the internet is not fair. But that's just how the web is today and whilst you might not like that it's not fair, that's the ballgame we're playing. When it comes to performance tests, I don't care about "fair", I only care about one thing: Let's take...

Let us start with what's wrong with the world today, and that's certificate authorities. Just take a look at the trusted root CAs running on a Windows 10 machine: The very premise of having these root CAs on your machine is that they ultimate get to decide which websites your browser will consider to have a valid SSL certificate. The root CAs serve other purposes too, but that's what I'm especially interested in here. Edit: As Tom points out below, there are hundreds of other root certs the OS will happily trust as required. Microsoft documents this on the Microsoft Trusted Root Certificate Program page. Now here's the point I'm driving at - if QuoVadis wants to sign a certificate...

I had a follower send me a curious question the other day which if I paraphrase, went like this: Hi, I was worried about the security of the Waitrose login form so I contacted them about it. They sent me a response but I’m not sure if it’s correct – can you shed some light on it? Actually, yes, I can and frankly, it’s a bit of a comedy of errors. For those not familiar with Waitrose, they’re a large British supermarket chain bringing in somewhere around five and a half billion (with a “b”) British pounds a year. They’re huge and they have access to more than...