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The TLS 1.2 Deadline is Looming, Do You Have Your Act Together?:
In the pantheon of security configuration duties for organizations running internet assets, maintaining the latest TLS encryption protocols to keep the cryptographic apparatus at full strength is one of the most fundamental. TLS provides cover for the most sensitive personal and financial information that moves across the internet. As experts in measuring and monitoring third-party risk, RiskRecon and the data scientists from Cyentia Institute recently published a new report that leveraged unique scan data from millions of web servers around the world, via the RiskRecon platform, to see where the rollout of TLS 1.2[*] is going smoothly and where it is meeting resistance.
Together with its precursor SSL, TLS has long been in the crosshairs of both attackers and security researchers who understand that a weak or non-existent deployment of the protocol makes it trivial enough to carry out man-in-the-middle and other attacks against the vulnerable target.
[...] Sectors such as Education (47%), Energy (40%), and Public Administration (37%) have struggled to implement TLS 1.2 protocols. This revelation led us to ask another question – “Are these hosts collecting and transmitting important information using vulnerable protocols?” The RiskRecon portal also determines web host value by examining whether a website collects and transmits important PII or credential information. If we restrict our view to just these high-value hosts, we can zero in on where the lack of TLS 1.2 represents a substantial risk: 1 in 10 organizations transmit private information over flawed protocols.
While our study found that this fundamental protocol lacks attention from some IT Security teams, it does not need any further introduction to those who would look to exploit any vulnerability in web communications. The clock is ticking to properly secure your lines of internet communications, standard bodies and web browsers have put out their warnings, and there is no time like to present to get up to speed.
[*] The latest version of TLS (Transport Layer Security) is 1.3; see RFC 8446.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Zinnia Zirconium on Monday July 20 2020, @03:13AM
Uh. No. Let's Encrypt doesn't verify ownership because Let's Encrypt is cheap. Ain't nobody at Let's Encrypt wanna gawk at a notarized photo of my government issued photo ID to prove I am who I say I am. That would take time and effort and somebody would want to get paid to do the work and it would raise the price of the certificate above free.
Let's Encrypt does only so much work as can be easily automated for free: challenge the HTTP server at a DNS domain name which I specify to produce a fukken stupid response. And by fukken stupid I mean "respond to this HTTP request by copying the request into the response."
I got Let's Encrypt to issue a certificate for my YouTube proxy which was the most challenging of my servers because my YouTube proxy is an HTTP server in a bash script. So wow I had to write two lines of code to pass the fukken stupid challenge that Let's Encrypt claims is proof enough that I'm me. But what if I'm not me. What if I'm some DNS hijacker who hijacked my domain. I am using No-IP.
Did I mention No-IP got DNS hijacked by Microsoft a few years ago. So now every troll says everybody should use Let's Encrypt and everybody knows every troll says everybody should use Let's Encrypt including every DNS hijacker. So now this year when somebody like Microsoft wants to hijack everybody at someplace like No-IP all they gotta do is take the extra step of renewing all the Let's Encrypt certificates for all the hijacked domains which the hijackers legitimately control according to Let's Encrypt fukken stupid challenge response shht.
Bam. Every browser shows the fukken lock icon and everybody trusts they connected to the server they expected and nobody notices Let's Encrypt is even more dangerous than not encrypting at all. At least when not encrypting everybody knows not to do stupid shht like type passwords and credit card numbers into a song search form.
So when is SoylentNews gonna get DNS hijacked and someone collects a nice collection of reusable passwords. Or is SoylentNews already hijacked. SoylentNews does use Let's Encrypt which just screams unnoticeable hijack.
See I don't need encryption. I don't accept passwords and I don't accept credit cards. I'm not a business and I'm not a bank.
I might actually go ahead and finish setting up socat with Let's Encrypt certificates and put socat in front of my HTTP servers for that warm fuzzy HTTPS feeling. But I would do it just for the technical challenge. It's all fukken pointless.