Browsers to End SHA-1 Support in 2017

Security vendor Venafi surveyed 11 million publicly available IPv4 sites and found that 35 percent still use Secure Hash Algorithm 1 (SHA-1) certificates. That’s surprising, because the hash function has been considered cryptographically weak for the last decade or so. It is highly vulnerable to collision attacks, which enable attackers to spoof websites.

SHA-1: An Insecure Hash Algorithm

SecurityWeek reported that Google, Microsoft and Mozilla will stop accepting the outdated certificates in January 2017. Certificate authorities (CAs) will stop issuing them and shift to SHA-2 around the same time.

Google, however, plans to offer a workaround, Threatpost reported. Chrome will be able to discern whether certificates are chained to public or local CAs. Those linked to local trust anchors may still be used even after the deadline. Certificates are also used to decide what can and cannot be trusted during an online transaction.

According to Venafi, after January this kind of certificate use will cause major performance disruptions. For example, browsers will alert users that sites using SHA-1 are insecure and won’t display a green padlock or other symbol for secure HTTPS transactions. Browsers may even block access to sites that use the outdated certificates.

“Leaving SHA-1 certificates in place is a like putting up a welcome sign for hackers that says, ‘We don’t care about security of our applications, data, and customers,'” Kevin Bocek, chief security strategist at Venafi, wrote on the company’s blog.

Nowhere to Hide

It may not be as simple as Bocek suggested. The average organization has over 23,000 keys and certificates, and many lack the tools and visibility to detect all SHA-1 certificates present in their sites. Still, it’s critical to get ahead of the potential problems.

“Unfortunately, in January there will be nowhere for these businesses to hide,” Bocek noted. “My advice is to get a plan in place now because it will be even more difficult to fix after the deprecation deadline when things start to break.”

That’s sound advice. Things are always harder to fix when they’re broken.

Larry Loeb

Principal, PBC Enterprises

NIST’s role in the global tech race against AI

4 min read - Last year, the United States Secretary of Commerce announced that the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has been put in charge of launching a new public working group on artificial intelligence (AI) that will build on the success of the NIST AI Risk Management Framework to address this rapidly advancing technology.However, recent budget cuts at NIST, along with a lack of strategy implementation, have called into question the agency’s ability to lead this critical effort. Ultimately, the success…

Researchers develop malicious AI ‘worm’ targeting generative AI systems

2 min read - Researchers have created a new, never-seen-before kind of malware they call the "Morris II" worm, which uses popular AI services to spread itself, infect new systems and steal data. The name references the original Morris computer worm that wreaked havoc on the internet in 1988.The worm demonstrates the potential dangers of AI security threats and creates a new urgency around securing AI models.New worm utilizes adversarial self-replicating promptThe researchers from Cornell Tech, the Israel Institute of Technology and Intuit, used what’s…

Passwords, passkeys and familiarity bias

5 min read - As passkey (passwordless authentication) adoption proceeds, misconceptions abound. There appears to be a widespread impression that passkeys may be more convenient and less secure than passwords. The reality is that they are both more secure and more convenient — possibly a first in cybersecurity.Most of us could be forgiven for not realizing passwordless authentication is more secure than passwords. Thinking back to the first couple of use cases I was exposed to — a phone operating system (OS) and a…

Security Intelligence

{{title}}

{{title}}

{{title}}

Topics

SHA-1: An Insecure Hash Algorithm

Nowhere to Hide

More from

NIST’s role in the global tech race against AI

Researchers develop malicious AI ‘worm’ targeting generative AI systems

Passwords, passkeys and familiarity bias

Topic updates