Security News
Microsoft has issued an out-of-band non-security update to address an issue triggering SSL/TLS handshake failures on client and server platforms. "We address an issue that might affect some types of Secure Sockets Layer and Transport Layer Security connections. These connections might have handshake failures," Microsoft explains.
In the last year, 60% of organizations suffered a certificate related outage that impacted their critical business applications. These outages are now costing large corporations an average of $5,600 per minute, damaging reputation and growth rates.
China appears to have upgraded its Great Firewall, the instrument of pervasive real-time censorship it uses to ensure that ideas its government doesn't like don't reach China's citizens. Great Firewall Report, an organization that monitors and reports on China's censorship efforts, has this week posted a pair of assessments indicating a crackdown on TLS encryption-based tools used to evade the Firewall.
The Russian government has established its own TLS certificate authority to address issues with accessing websites that have arisen in the wake of sanctions imposed by the west following the country's unprovoked military invasion of Ukraine. According to a message posted on the Gosuslugi public services portal, the Ministry of Digital Development is expected to provide a domestic replacement to handle the issuance and renewal of TLS certificates should they get revoked or expired.
Last November, Rajesh Ramamurthy, director of product management for Azure DevOps, announced plans to phase out support for TLS 1.0/1.1 because of the risk of protocol downgrade attacks and other TLS vulnerabilities outside Microsoft's control. TLS downgrade attacks aim to turn strong, more recent versions of TLS into weaker, earlier versions of the protocol to facilitate further exploitation.
Russia is offering its own trusted Transport Layer Security certificate authority to replace certificates that need to be renewed by foreign countries. According to a notice on Russia's public service portal, Gosuslugi, as shown in a translated version in this article's featured art, the certificates will replace foreign security certs if they expire or get yanked by foreign CAs.
Russia has created its own trusted TLS certificate authority to solve website access problems that have been piling up after sanctions prevent certificate renewals. The sanctions imposed by western companies and governments are preventing Russian sites from renewing existing TLS certificates, causing browsers to block access to sites with expired certificates.
Apple has deprecated the insecure Transport Layer Security 1.0 and 1.1 protocols in recently launched iOS and macOS versions and plans to remove support in future releases altogether. The original TLS 1.0 specification and its TLS 1.1 successor have been used for almost 20 years.
The OpenSSL Project has released OpenSSL 3.0, a major new stable version of the popular and widely used cryptography library. OpenSSL contain an open-source implementation of the SSL and TLS protocols, which provide the ability to secure communications across networks.
The bad news, of course, is that ALPACA is a vulnerability nevertheless, or more precisely a family of vulnerabilities, and it exists because we, as an internet community, haven't been quite as careful or as precise as perhaps we should have been when setting up our servers to use TLS in the first place. The researchers discovered that millions of network domains out there not only use TLS on multiple servers for multiple different purposes, such as securing both HTTP and SMTP, but also often fail to keep the verification part of the TLS process separate for the different services they offer.