SoylentNews

SHA1 Sunset Will Block Millions From Encrypted Net, Facebook Warns

posted by martyb on Friday December 11 2015, @04:55PM   
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

• Re:Who is actually blocked Re:Who is actually blocked (Score: 2, Redundant) by pendorbound on Friday December 11 2015, @05:22PM

  by pendorbound (2688) on Friday December 11 2015, @05:22PM (#275043) Homepage

  Current Firefox installs down to SnowLeopard which was released in 2009. The last PPC-based Mac (that can't update to Snowy) was released in 2006.

  No question you still have people out there using PPC Mac's, but I think it's time... Maybe someone can backport SHA-256 to Firefox 16.

  Parent

  Starting Score:	1		point
  Moderation		0
  Redundant=1, Underrated=1, Total=2
  Extra 'Redundant' Modifier		0
  Karma-Bonus Modifier		+1
  Total Score:		2

• Re:Who is actually blocked (Score: 4, Informative) by SomeGuy on Friday December 11 2015, @06:07PM

  by SomeGuy (5632) on Friday December 11 2015, @06:07PM (#275068)

  No question you still have people out there using PPC Mac's, but I think it's time... Maybe someone can backport SHA-256 to Firefox 16.

  Already done.

  Firefox 38.4.0 ESR for Mac OS 10.4 and 10.5 on Mac PPC: http://www.floodgap.com/software/tenfourfox/ [floodgap.com]

  Parent