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SHA1 Sunset Will Block Millions From Encrypted Net, Facebook Warns

posted by martyb on Friday December 11 2015, @04:55PM   Printer-friendly
from the failure-to-communicate dept.

darkfeline informed us about:

http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/12/sha1-sunset-will-block-millions-from-encrypted-net-facebook-warns/

SHA1 certificates for secure SSL/TLS communications are deprecated due to known computational vulnerabilities. To ensure secure communications, a forced deprecation sounds reasonable (i.e. refuse to connect to these). That has the side effect that it will lock out many users who are unable to use stronger hashes such as SHA256. However, if a fallback to SHA1 is provided (as Facebook is proposing), everyone will be vulnerable to SHA1 downgrade man-in-the-middle attacks.

What to do?

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by tempest on Friday December 11 2015, @05:54PM

    by tempest (3050) on Friday December 11 2015, @05:54PM (#275061)

    I find it hard to believe this 7% isn't finding most of the internet dysfunctional already. If you're using windows XP with service pack 2 or lower, you have a lot more issues than this.

    The bigger problem is that you may not get an "obvious" error. I had this kind of issue a few weeks ago when a vendor was complaining they couldn't connect to a website because of "networking problems". Eventually I tracked it back to the version of IE they were using didn't support the required encryption to connect to the site. But the error was "cannot connect" with the usual Microsoft kind of "there could be a million things that are wrong" debugging help.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 11 2015, @06:13PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 11 2015, @06:13PM (#275075)

    I have an Ancient GnuSense Laptop that I have not gotten around to upgrading yet. I get similar mysterious failure. Sometimes websites will work for a while, then suddenly refuse to (looking at you ixquick).

    I strongly suspect lack of support for newer hash algorithms is the problem.