Slashdot Mirror
UK Universities Caught With Weak SSL Security
judgecorp writes "UK Universities have been found using weak SSL security implementations on their websites. An investigation by TechWeekEurope found 17 of the top 50 British universities scored C or worse on the SSL Labs tool launched by the Trustworthy Internet Movement earlier this year, which grades SSL security. Contacted by the site, most have put upgrades in place to improve security."
In the end, Unis don't want web services to be their core business.
Where once Sysadmins managed the web, now it is run by project managers,
consultants, standardised, virtualised, outsourced or offshored.
The nerds get marginalised and the job gets dumbed down.
Quality falls, hilarity ensues. Everybody dies.
TechWeekEurope found 17 of the top 50 British universities scored C or worse on the SSL Labs tool
All right, which of you tossers went and buggered the curve?
Our websites were rated at C/D, and our intranet was susceptible to BEAST*. It's also quite handy for advising you on what ciphers to disable. All at A now - it's given me a nice warm feeling inside.
* Yes, I know, BEAST was published in September - I know I'm not worth my salt.
This is hilarious. "Weak SSL Security Settings" is what pentesters write to pad out their report when they run out of useful findings. Universities have the poorest computer security of any type of organisation, period. Now, there are a lot of reasons for that - one of which is the inherent conflict between running an "open" network and keeping things secure. But if "poor SSL security settings" is the worst security issue a uni has, they are doing incredibly well.
Weak SSL security is something you exploit if a) you're a government, or b) you're screwing around with people in a coffee shop. Most of the published attacks are academic, and the only tool people regularly use is sslstrip or attacks along those lines. Hell, most users click through certificate warnings anyway.
But hey, even though SSL is "not usually the actual problem", these things should be fixed. If you want to test your own site, head over to: https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/index.html and plug in your domain name. If you're just running a "1 apache site", that satisfying green bar or "A grade" is just a few config stanzas and a restart away.
Doing research requires setting up a lot of one-off services, like a logbook, wiki, etc. Getting correct certificates for these things is a pain, and it's just not done. So users end up having to accept a large number of self-signed certificates, and bypass the annoying warnings in Firefox. SSL seems to have been designed for large shopping websites, while temporary and small-time web sites / services can't use it effectively. Using a self-signed certificate is much better than not encrypting data, as it prevents snooping in most cases (except for MITM attacks), so this is done. It would be good if browsers adopted a model more similar to SSH's "known_hosts", where there was a simple prompt for first-time visits to sites with unknown self-signed certificates, and the certificate was saved. They could reserve the ridiculous end-of-the-world warnings (like they show currently) for when the certificate changed unexpectedly. People should probably never use short expiry dates for self-signed certificate (unless they set up a CA)
Unfortunately that's not the end of it. I recently found out my alma mater uses software to manage the alumni records from a company called Blackbaud. The software includes a website that alumni can use to keep the university up to date with their contact details, find out about events and hunt down old classmates. The engineers at Blackbaud in their infinite wisdom chose to store passwords in a recoverable format. I nearly flipped when I did a password recovery a few weeks back and was sent my actual password... in plaintext.
I contacted the university and after a long wait, during which the linkedin password leak occurred, I got the answer of "we use this software, there's nothing we can do about it".