Not up to our usual standards

For a few years now, I’ve been working on and off on a set of libraries which collect cryptography- and security-related code I’ve written for other projects as well as functionality which is not already available under a permissive license, or where existing implementations do not meet my expectations of cleanliness, readability, portability and embeddability.

(Aside: the reasons why this has taken years, when I initially expected to publish the first release in the spring or summer of 2014, are too complex to explain here; I may write about them at a later date. Keywords are health, family and world events.)

Two of the major features of that collection are the OATH Authentication Methods (which includes the algorithm used by Google Authenticator and a number of commercial one-time code fobs) and the Common Platform Enumeration, part of the Security Content Automation Protocol. I implemented the former years ago for my employer, and it has languished in the OpenPAM repository since 2012. The latter, however, has proven particularly elusive and frustrating, to the point where it has existed for two years as merely a header file and a set of mostly empty functions, just to sketch out the API. I decided to have another go at it yesterday, and actually made quite a bit of progress, only to hit the wall again. And this morning, I realized why. Continue reading “Not up to our usual standards”

SSLv3

UPDATE 2014-10-14 23:40 UTC The details have been published: meet the SSL POODLE attack.

UPDATE 2014-10-15 11:15 UTC Simpler server test method, corrected info about browsers

UPDATE 2014-10-15 16:00 UTC More information about client testing

El Reg posted an article earlier today about a purported flaw in SSL 3.0 which may or may not be real, but it’s been a bad year for SSL, we’re all on edge, and we’d rather be safe than sorry. So let’s take it at face value and see what we can do to protect ourselves. If nothing else, it will force us to inspect our systems and make conscious decisions about their configuration instead of trusting the default settings. What can we do?

The answer is simple: there is no reason to support SSL 3.0 these days. TLS 1.0 is fifteen years old and supported by every browser that matters and over 99% of websites. TLS 1.1 and TLS 1.2 are eight and six years old, respectively, and are supported by the latest versions of all major browsers (except for Safari on Mac OS X 10.8 or older), but are not as widely supported on the server side. So let’s disable SSL 2.0 and 3.0 and make sure that TLS 1.0, 1.1 and 1.2 are enabled.

Continue reading “SSLv3”