Let’s Encrypt Will Stop Working For Older Android Devices

Let’s Encrypt was founded in 2012, going public in 2014, with the aim to improve security on the web. The goal was to be achieved by providing free, automated access to SSL and TLS certificates that would allow websites to make the switch over to HTTPS without having to spend any money.

Hundreds of millions of sites rely on Let’s Encrypt for their HTTPS certificate needs. HTTPS security helps protect sites and users, and makes it harder for malicious actors to steal private information.

The project has just announced that, come September 1, 2021, some older software will stop trusting their certificates. Let’s look at why this has come to pass, and what it means going forward.

Certificates Expire

When Let’s Encrypt first went public in early 2016, they issued their own root certificate, by the name ISRG Root X1. However, it takes time for companies to include updated root certificates in their software, so until recently, all Let’s Encrypt certificates were cross-signed by an IdenTrust certificate, DST Root X3. This certificate had been around much longer, and was already supported by the vast majority of OSes and browsers in regular use. This allowed Let’s Encrypt to hit the ground running while they waited for the majority of software to support their own root certificate. Continue reading “Let’s Encrypt Will Stop Working For Older Android Devices”

Anti-Hack: Free Automated SSL Certificates

You want to put your credit card number into a web site. You know to look for a secure web site. But what does that really prove? And now that so many electronic projects have Web servers (ok, I’ll say it… the Internet of Things), do you need to secure your web server?

There was a time when getting a secure certificate (at least one that was meaningful) cost a pretty penny. However, a new initiative backed by some major players (like Cisco, Google, Mozilla, and many others) wants to give you a free SSL certificate. One reason they can afford to do this is they have automated the verification process so the cost to provide a certificate is very low.

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Black Hat 2009: Breaking SSL With Null Characters

Update: The video of [Moxie]’s presentation is now online.

[Moxie Marlinspike] appeared on our radar back in February when he showed sslstrip at Black Hat DC. It was an amazing piece of software that could hijack and rewrite all SSL connections. The differences between a legitimate site and the hijacked ones were very hard to notice. He recently stumbled across something thing that makes the attack even more effective.

Continue reading “Black Hat 2009: Breaking SSL With Null Characters”

25C3: Hackers Completely Break SSL Using 200 PS3s

A team of security researchers and academics has broken a core piece of internet technology. They made their work public at the 25th Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin today. The team was able to create a rogue certificate authority and use it to issue valid SSL certificates for any site they want. The user would have no indication that their HTTPS connection was being monitored/modified.

Continue reading “25C3: Hackers Completely Break SSL Using 200 PS3s”