November 29, 2019

Recommended online platform for testing SSL, TLS, and the latest vulnerabilities

This is an undeniable fact that the threat landscape has been evolving at an unprecedented rate. Modern-day businesses cannot ignore the security of their technical infrastructure under the belief that the attackers will not target them. The attackers always remain on the lookout for identifying vulnerabilities and exploiting them for a variety of reasons.
Since absolute security is a myth, vulnerabilities are bound to be there. In this article, we will be discussing what are SSL and TLS, along with a recommended tool for testing them and the latest vulnerabilities.

SSL & TLS

SSL stands for Secure Socket Layer, and TLS stands for Transport Layer Security. Both of them are cryptographic protocols that support authentication and data encryption between machines, applications, and servers connected to a network. TLS is the successor to SSL. Over the years, new versions of these protocols have been released for supporting stronger and more secure algorithms and cipher suites.

Background

SSL 2.0 was released for the public in 1995, and Netscape originally developed it. The first version of SSL was never released to the public. After several vulnerabilities were discovered in the second release, SSL 3.0 was released shortly in 1996. Based on SSL 3.0, TLS was introduced in 1999 as a new version of SSL. However, security experts believe that though there are no dramatic differences between SSL 3.0 and TLS 1.0, they are significant enough that interoperation is not a possibility.
As of now, TLS 1.3 is the latest version published in 2018 as RFC 8446. Before this, RFC 5246 defined TLS 1.2 way back in August 2008. As far as SSL is concerned, IETF has deprecated SSL 2.0 and SSL 3.0 in 2011 and 2015, respectively. Security researchers have continued to find vulnerabilities in SSL 2.0 and SSL 3.0 even now, and popular browsers show a degraded UX via showing a line through the lock in the URL browser, security warnings, etc. As an ideal practice, SSL 2.0 and SSL 3.0 must be disabled in an organization’s server configuration, and only TLS should remain enabled.

Difference between SSL and TLS

Cryptographically, every new version comes with its own set of improvements. Though it is the same protocol, SSL and TLS are the names given to its different versions. If TLS were not the name, it would have been SSL 4.0. As new versions are launched, improvements are made over the last version so that the flaws found in the older version addressed.

Certificates and Protocols

When it comes to certificates, it must be noted that certificates are not dependent on protocols. An organization does not need to buy separate certificates for SSL and TLS. These certificates are commonly referred to as “SSL certificate,” as this term is more familiar than the “TLS certificate.” So, a vendor may choose to call it an “SSL certificate” or “SSL/TLS certificate,” which means the same thing. Our security experts have recently noted that TLS is slowly gaining popularity across the cybersecurity industry.