Microsoft Finally Bans SHA-1 Certificates In Its Browsers (zdnet.com)

An anonymous reader quotes ZDNet: With this week's monthly Patch Tuesday, Microsoft has also rolled out a new policy for Edge and Internet Explorer that prevents sites that use a SHA-1-signed HTTPS certificate from loading. The move brings Microsoft's browsers in line with Chrome, which dropped support for the SHA-1 cryptographic hash function in January's stable release of Chrome 56, and Firefox's February cut-off... Apple dropped support for SHA-1 in March with macOS Sierra 10.12.4 and iOS 10.3... Once Tuesday's updates are installed, Microsoft's browsers will no longer load sites with SHA-1 signed certificates and will display an error warning highlighting a security problem with the site's certificate.

Comments

well you know what they say

[nimbius]

Better 5 months late and unannounced with no industry coordination or planning than never. Either the clocks are slow at Redmond or they just can't be bothered to care

Re:well you know what they say

[ShanghaiBill]

Better 5 months late and unannounced with no industry coordination or planning than never.

Anyone with a brain knew this was going to happen and already made the transition years ago. The procrastinating and/or ignorant people caught with their pants down would not have responded to any effort at coordination, and are not capable of planning.

Re:well you know what they say

[Billly Gates]

Good luck with that. Some places would label you as a troublemaker for insulting their phb who paid millions for these web apps. I left my former employer over such things as they refused to update anything and didn't want to be fired when shit hit the fan

Re:well you know what they say

[Anonymous Coward]

https://technet.microsoft.com/...

"This change will only impact SHA-1 certificates that chain to a root in the Microsoft Trusted Root Program where the end-entity certificate or the issuing intermediate uses SHA-1. Enterprise or self-signed SHA-1 certificates will not be impacted,"

Re:well you know what they say

[E-Rock]

I'm not sure why that's a problem. Self signed certs already give you a warning page, so no difference there. For Enterprise certs they've been warning us for quite a while to change out our CA root certs to stop using SHA-1 and start phasing out the old certs. However, if a business hasn't done that, they're not breaking things.

Re:well you know what they say

[Anonymous Coward]

they only give you a warning message if you don't install them into the trusted persons store.

Re:well you know what they say

[Anonymous Coward]

it doesn't impact those in any way. If you have zero idea of the very basics on how certificates work, why post here? serious question. I don't know much about poetry. I don't post on poetry forums. why do you post on slashdot? did you miss that? "site for nerds." right up top. it means it's not for you.

Re:well you know what they say

[Anonymous Coward]

Not all browsers allow accepting insecure certificates as permanently accepted certificates. And there are many sites which handle small, nonfiscal transactions for which decrypting the transmision has very little risk. Weather reports, for example, don't particularly need to be encrypted and are not high value content if successfully intercepted.

Re:well you know what they say

[Anonymous Coward]

They weren't polite, but they were correct - the person doesn't know how to create, deploy, or manage certificates on internal systems as is clear from their comment, so why did they bother?

Re:well you know what they say

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly the problem you dont seem to understand - you CANNOT "create, deploy or manage certificates on internal systems" like ilo, they generate a csr and a key, you can download the csr, sign it externally and upload the crt, but they do NOT allow you to upload your own key/cert. Now try to guess, what that csr uses as hashing...

But, to add, the Internet Exporer patch seems only to lead to a warning, that the certificate is invalid, and not a mozilla style "You cannnnnnnnnnnnot pass!!!"-error that cant be skipped by any means, as i expected it...

Re:well you know what they say

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess that puts you in that category, too. In case you weren't aware the PKI subsystems of Windows 2003, Windows XP and earlier cannot handle SHA2 certificates for the majority of use cases (client- and server-identification, code signing, etc.). Ergo, updating certificates from SHA1 to SHA2 will break those systems.

We've been dual signing our applications with SHA1 and SHA2 for about five years now to support SmartScreen on SHA2-based systems like Windows 8+ while maintaining legacy support for the SHA1-based systems of large corporations that pay us lots of money for service yet, ironically (moronically), refuse to upgrade their own computer networks.

Not a problem with my formal employer

[Billly Gates]

We still use IE 6 for such sites

Whatever, think about this

[Anonymous Coward]

Whatever, think about the fact that *ANY* site you have visited over https in the last 30 years is now broken. Yes, "they" recorded it all. What have you done?

Re:Whatever, think about this

[Anonymous Coward]

Blah blah blah blah. You have no idea what the fuck you are talking about. Now go away Richard, you've got cheetos in your neckbeard.

Who modded this drivel up?

[Anonymous Coward]

It was announced over three years ago (and they gave a year's extension):

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/security/2880823.aspx

Microsoft may be shite at a lot of things, but one thing they aren't is giving their enterprise customers long-term notice about changes like this.

backwards compatability

[JustNiz]

I wonder if they still support ROT13 certificates.

Re:backwards compatability

[Lennie]

There is no such thing.

Please learn the basics of cryptography. There are 2 big categories:

A: encryption schemes

B: cryptographic one-way hash

ROT13 goes in bucket A, SHA-1 goes in bucket B.

While we are on the subject, encryption schemes come in 2 flavours:

1: symmetric key encryption (same key)

2: Public key cryptography, or asymmetric cryptography

Go read a few Wikipedia pages, it's really not as hard as you would expect.

Re:backwards compatability

[JustNiz]

Your sense of humor detector is broken.

Re:backwards compatability

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no such thing.

There is no such thing such as my sense of humor

FTFY.

Why ban it?

[Zorpheus]

It is no secure encryption, so it is just as insecure as an unencrypted site. But since it is banned we can't even view these sites anymore. That makes no sense. There should just be a warning, similar to what you get for an untrusted certificate.

Re:Why ban it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because no security is better than weak security.

At least according to the numpties that produce these policies.

Whoever thought it was a good idea to *refuse* to connect should be taken out, given a beating, introduced to how the real world works outside their ivory tower and then shot. Twice.

Re:Why ban it?

[Eravnrekaree]

The problem with this thinking is sites which handle payment data and other sensitive data who are refusing to upgrade. By keeping it for low risk sites, we also keep it for high risk sites to abuse as well. We have to cut it off for all sites to stop the high risk ones from using it.

  TLS creates the appearance of security but high risk sites can use broken old technology with TLS and give the appearance of security when the security is terribly broken, giving the user (and even ignorant and lazy site operators) the false assurance of security. It actually is even more true of site operators who think they have good security because they have TLS when they do not. There are still companies out there that think this way and have this cavalier atttitude about security.

Maybe the browsers should offer a period where there is a warning message and the user has to manually override the message to load the site as which is now done with invalid certs. This would create enough inconvenience for users that it will prod site operators to fix things.

Also you mention unencrypted connections: The day might be coming when browsers dump all unencrypted HTTP support, which would be a good thing. Things are headed that way, to give people no excuse to not do it by google making getting TLS certs free and easy. But the point is if TLS is being used with broken alogorthms it creates the false appearance of security

Re: This will break GIT!

[Anonymous Coward]

Erm... What?!

To maintain the illusion of managed

[Anonymous Coward]

It's easy to compile seamonkey, and even stock version has config options for which SSL versions it accepts. Personally, i don't trust a browser i haven't compiled myself with the config and code reviewed to best of my ability...

These Horses Patoots need to buy a Dictionary

[Anonymous Coward]

SHA-1 certificates are not "banned". They are still recognized and work perfectly fine thank-you-very-much.

The correct headline should be "Microsoft pops up certificate warnings for SHA-1 signed certificates".

But I guess this fails because (a) it is accurate (b) it is too long; and (c) it is not "shrill" and "scary" enough to sell newspapers.

huh?

[Ol Olsoc]

Does Edge work as a browser yet?

Non-security-related features bundled

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah well this security patch also bundles a large number of non-security related fixes, as well as some new "features". Features such as "Update adds search box to new tab pages in Internet Explorer 11" -- anyone know if this is another MS advertising push? Microsoft's patches can't be trusted anymore, so I have to ask.

EXACTLY!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sick and tired of this nanny crap. Put up warnings, multiple dialogs, hell, make me type "I know this site is not secure and want to proceed anyway" for frick's sake! Or put it in the advanced options, and turn the whole browser window red for all I care! Sometimes I simply DO NOT CARE and I need to access the page anyway! ASSHATS! This is often the case with internally-facing legacy applications behind firewalls, old embedded systems, sometimes even within completely isolated networks. Stop trying to "protect" me from myself. I happen to know what the hell I'm doing thank you very much, and I don't have time to compile a browser, or dig up an old horffyingly insecure browser on an old horrifyingly insecure OS every time I need to access an old piece of equipment _sometimes for the purpose of /actually updating it/ you jackasses!_

Seriously, is it really too much to ask to let me, as the system's owner/administrator control the security of the systems I manage?

Re:EXACTLY!

[Anonymous Coward]

To elaborate, I mean in general, not only in this specific case. Just this week, someone accidentally revoked the wrong certificate for a critical, internally facing application. Users got the "sorry, I will not allow you to view this page because it is using a revoked certificate, period." There is literally NO WORKAROUND that doesn't involve either compiling a browser or using an old browser that is far far more insecure than just allowing me to view the damn page with ample warnings. So the app was down until the problem could be fixed (which had to wait for someone in a different region to become available to straighten things out). Thanks Google, Mozilla, and Microsoft, we really appreciate it guys! You really made us much more secure and productive with your heavy-handed, non-bypassable, nanny-browser idiocy. I could go on, about Oracle Java and Adobe Flash/Air, and also needing unsigned drivers at times on Windows, but that's getting off topic.

Re:EXACTLY!

[Anonymous Coward]

You have that choice. If security is not an issue, just run an old browser.

Re: EXACTLY!

[Anonymous Coward]

Not the same thing! Old browser might pwn your machine. Bad encryption just means you cannot trust the content on the page but that does not really matter for low value targets like food recipes etc.

Re: EXACTLY!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, that's my point. I don't want to tell my users to run IE6 just so they can access a legacy application for absolutely no (technical) reason other than an arbitrary "security" decision by the browser developers to take away my ability to accept the risk in cases where I feel it's appropriate. It would actually be MUCH more secure for everyone involved if I could provide instructions for users to bypass the error and view the page anyway _only for specific, known, exceptions_ or better yet to be able to push a policy to systems that allows only these specific pre-appproved sites, so that I can manage the security of my own company's users rather than having Google, et, al, heavy-handedly shove a one size fits all "fix" to my users if they want to use a modern and more secure browser at all. This stuff used to work OK with adding to trusted zone, adding certs to trusted ca store, launching the browser with a special command line option, or updating advanced settings, etc. Now instead there are multiple situations where there is absolutely no way to force the browser to display the page at all (one of these is if the certificate is revoked, even accidentally, and even with hold status). That's just stupid! This goes beyond merely "erring on the side of safety" and into "you must do as we say no matter what because we know better than you and there's not a damn thing you can do about it" territory.

IT department still uses SHA-1

[MobyDisk]

I work for a large company that has a proxy server that does MITM attacks. The certs issued by the server are SHA-1, so we haven't been able to use Chrome and Firefox for months. The funny thing is that they even recommend using Chrome for certain sites. Many of us have opened tickets on this and they just don't seem to understand that this isn't a bug in Chrome. *facepalm* I hope this finally forces them to fix it. Although I don't have high hopes. Odds are more that they will try to block the update, and if anyone winds-up with it they will be considered out-of-compliance and IT will reformat their machines.