A study of what really breaks SSL

Earlier this year, we at SSL Labs conducted a second, much deeper survey of SSL usage. (I can now say "we" and really mean it, because most of the work on the survey was done by my Qualys coleague, Michael Small.) I presented the results last week at Hack In the Box Amsterdam:

We love security metrics because they tell us what really goes on out there. Last year we conducted an analysis of millions of SSL servers, showing, for the first time, how SSL is really used. This year we are pushing our study further by deepening and expending our efforts in several key areas. We will be looking at the problems that really break SSL — insecure session cookies, mixed content, incorrect site configuration, and distribution of trust to third-party sites. The best crypto in the world is not going to help a site that has flaws in these critical areas.

To discover these flaws we are building a custom site crawler, which we are then going to run against the world’s 1 million most used web sites. In addition to all that, we are expanding the scope of the study to include protocols other than HTTP, as well as basing our assessment on an updated version of the rating guide. The end result? We are finally going to find out how useful SSL really is.

Get the slides here:

• A study of what really breaks SSL (PDF)

Comments

[adrian]

within the slides(slide 27, I haven't seen the presentation) it says:
"Sites without redirection are easily exploitable via sslstrip or Firesheep"

I beg to differ if redirection =HTTP->HTTPS: with or without redirection sslstrip can easily "exploit" them.
in fact one can have a HTTPS only site(no plain HTTP) and users will still be easily "exploited" if they do not type https:// or use HSTS with a pre-loaded list or so.
from a technical point of view redirection(HTTP->HTTPS) is pretty bad for a way of using SSL. unfortunately will stay for a while...

Cheers!
Adrian

[Ivan Ristic]

Adrian,

My point was that the sites without redirection are clearly easily exploitable. Those with redirection may be exploitable too, but it's not going to be as easy. For example, if you always redirect to SSL, the users are going to bookmark the SSL pages and go to them directly in the future.

At the end of the day, the only way to be reasonably secure is to use HSTS with a long-term expiry time.