Tagssl

Protocol-relative URLs in email

When you link to an external resource – an image, a javascript file, some css style – from a web page you do so with a URL, usually something like “; or “;. The world is beginning to go all https, all the time, but until recently good practice was to make a web page available via both http and https. The problem is that if you try and load a resource from an http URL from...

Google drops obsolete crypto

Google is disabling support for email sent using version 3 of SSL or using the RC4 cypher. They’re both very old – SSLv3 was obsoleted by TLS1.0 in 1999, and RC4 is nearly thirty years old and while it’s aged better than some cyphers there are multiple attacks against it and it’s been replaced with more recent cyphers almost everywhere. Google has more to say about it on...

Our green bar certificate is going away

Later today we’ll be switching from an Extended Validation (“green bar”) SSL certificate to a Domain Validation certificate. This isn’t exactly a planned change but I’m waiting for responses from Comodo before I go into it too much. I’ll share some more details next week.

Lets Encrypt Everything

Using SSL TLS to protect data in transit and authenticate servers you contacted originally required specialized software, complex configuration and expensive and complicated to require certificates. The need for specialized software is long since gone. Pretty much every web server and mail server will support SSL out of the box. Basic server configuration is now pretty simple – give the...

Protect your email with TLS

You probably use TLS hundreds of times a day. If you don’t recognize the term, you might know it better by it’s older name, SSL. TLS is what protects your data in transit whenever you go to Google, or Yahoo or even this blog. The little padlock in your browser address bar tells you that your browser has used the TLS protocol to do two things. First, it’s decided that the server...

If you have servers using SSL, read this

I was going to post about SSL certification and setup today, but the security world got ahead of me. Recent versions of openssl – the library used by most applications to implement SSL – released over the past couple of years have a critical bug in them. This bug lets any attacker read any information from the process that’s running SSL, reliably, silently and without leaving...

Recent Posts

Archives

Follow Us