{"id":8765,"date":"2011-04-11T10:09:05","date_gmt":"2011-04-11T14:09:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=8765"},"modified":"2011-04-11T10:09:38","modified_gmt":"2011-04-11T14:09:38","slug":"ssl-is-just-an-illusion-of-security","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2011\/04\/11\/ssl-is-just-an-illusion-of-security\/","title":{"rendered":"SSL is “just an illusion of security”"},"content":{"rendered":"

SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is critically important to safe communications on the internet. It may also be “hopelessly broken<\/a>“:<\/p>\n

\n

SSL made its debut in 1994 as a way to cryptographically secure e-commerce and other sensitive internet communications. A private key at the heart of the system allows website operators to prove that they are the rightful owners of the domains visitors are accessing, rather than impostors who have hacked the users’ connections. Countless websites also use SSL to encrypt passwords, emails and other data to thwart anyone who may be monitoring the traffic passing between the two parties.<\/p>\n

It’s hard to overstate the reliance that websites operated by Google, PayPal, Microsoft, Bank of America and millions of other companies place in SSL. And yet, the repeated failures suggest that the system in its current state is hopelessly broken.<\/p>\n

\u201cRight now, it’s just an illusion of security,\u201d said Moxie Marlinspike, a security researcher who has repeatedly poked holes in the technical underpinnings of SSL. \u201cDepending on what you think your threat is, you can trust it on varying levels, but fundamentally, it has some pretty serious problems.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although SSL’s vulnerabilities are worrying, critics have reserved their most biting assessments for the business practices of Comodo, VeriSign, GoDaddy and the other so-called certificate authorities, known as CAs for short. Once their root certificates are included in Internet Explorer, Firefox and other major browsers, they can’t be removed without creating disruptions on huge swaths of the internet.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is critically important to safe communications on the internet. It may also be “hopelessly broken“: SSL made its debut in 1994 as a way to cryptographically secure e-commerce and other sensitive internet communications. A private key at the heart of the system allows website operators to prove that they are the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[436,157,58,388,334],"class_list":["post-8765","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-banking","tag-encryption","tag-internet","tag-secrecy","tag-security"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-2hn","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8765","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8765"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8765\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8767,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8765\/revisions\/8767"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8765"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8765"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8765"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}