Published 2020-12-01
Firefox is the only major browser that still evaluates every website it connects to whether the certificate used has been reported as revoked. Firefox users are notified of all connections involving untrustworthy certificates, regardless the popularity of the site. Inconveniently, checking certificate status sometimes slows down the connection to websites.... [read more]
Published 2020-11-27
Since Firefox Nightly is now using CRLite to determine if enrolled websites’ certificates are revoked, it’s useful to dig into the data to answer why a given certificate issuer gets enrolled or not.
Ultimately this is a matter of whether the CRLs for a given issuer are available to... [read more]
Published 2020-11-26
Firefox Nightly is now using CRLite to determine if websites’ certificates are revoked — e.g., if the Certificate Authority published that web browsers shouldn’t trust that website certificate. Telemetry shows that querying the local CRLite dataset is much faster than making a network connection for OCSP, which makes... [read more]
Published 2020-01-21
CRLite pushes bulk certificate revocation information to Firefox users, reducing the need to actively query such information one by one. Additionally this new technology eliminates the privacy leak that individual queries can bring, and does so for the whole Web, not just special parts of it.
[read more]Published 2020-01-09
CRLite is a technology to efficiently compress revocation information for the whole Web PKI into a format easily delivered to Web users. It addresses the performance and privacy pitfalls of the Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP) while avoiding a need for some administrative decisions on the relative value of one... [read more]
Published 2020-01-09
CRLite is a technology proposed by a group of researchers at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy 2017 that compresses revocation information so effectively that 300 megabytes of revocation data can become 1 megabyte.
[read more]Published 2019-08-05
Firefox for Android (Fennec) now supports the Web Authentication API as of version 68. WebAuthn blends public-key cryptography into web application logins, and is our best technical response to credential phishing. Applications leveraging WebAuthn gain new second factor and “passwordless” biometric authentication capabilities. Now, Firefox for Android... [read more]
Published 2018-12-04
I gave a lightning talk at our Mozilla All-Hands meeting about CRLite, a new technology for delivering revocations for the Web PKI to all clients in a very compressed form.
[read more]Published 2018-01-11
Web Authentication is now enabled in Firefox Nightly, with intent to ship in version 60.
[read more]Published 2017-12-04
At Mozilla’s Austin All-Hands I gave a lightning talk about Web Authentication, which is our best technical solution to the scourge of phishing today.
[read more]Published 2017-08-18
Certificate Revocation Lists (CRLs) are a way for Certificate Authorities to announce to their relying parties (e.g., users validating the certificates) that a Certificate they issued should no longer be trusted. E.g., was revoked.
[read more]Published 2017-07-10
We’re changing the methodology used to calculate the Let’s Encrypt Statistics page, primarily to better cope with the growth of Let’s Encrypt. Over the past several months it’s become clear that the existing methodology is less accurate than we had expected, over-counting the number of websites using Let’s... [read more]
Published 2017-05-16
I’ve been supplying the statistics for Let’s Encrypt since they’ve launched. In Q4 of 2016 their volume of certificates exceeded the ability of my database server to cope, and I moved it to an Amazon RDS instance.
[read more]Published 2017-02-23
Our deprecation plan for the SHA-1 algorithm in the public Web, first announced in 2015, is drawing to a close. Today a team of researchers from CWI Amsterdam and Google revealed the first practical collision for SHA-1, affirming the insecurity of the algorithm and reinforcing our judgment that... [read more]
Published 2016-09-30
Yesterday Let’s Encrypt reached a new milestone: the unique set of all fully-qualified domain names in the currently-unexpired certificates issued by Let’s Encrypt is now 10,022,446.
[read more]Published 2016-07-05
Today at the RMLL conference’s security track I’m talking about some of the challenges, decisions, and trade-offs that occurred while launching Let’s Encrypt, in a talk I’ve called Let’s Encrypt: The Road To Encrypting All The Things.
[read more]Published 2016-04-05
This is a quick status update from the Early Impacts of Let’s Encrypt post.
[read more]Published 2016-02-19
During the months I worked in Let’s Encrypt’s operations team I got fairly used to being the go-to man for any question that a database query could solve.
[read more]Published 2016-01-15
All the first Let’s Encrypt certs for my websites from the LE private beta began expiring last week, so it was time to work through the renewal tooling
[read more]Published 2015-10-20
A bigger blog post will have to wait, but just as a brief note:
Let’s Encrypt is now publicly trusted. In fact, this blog is using a certificate from Let’s Encrypt. And so is usr.bin.coffee, of course.
[read more]Published 2015-10-08
One of the advantages to being part of the Let’s Encrypt team is early access to the closed beta. As such, I’ve been able to issue a handful of certificates from the service. For example: usr.bin.coffee. There’s a lot of other upsides as well, such as working with incredible... [read more]
Published 2015-04-10
GatorLUG has invited me to talk about Let’s Encrypt at their April 2015 meeting. I’m honored to be playing a role in the architecture and implementation of Let’s Encrypt; here are the slides I’ll be presenting.
[read more]On a mission to solve communications security issues for the whole Internet. That, and drink coffee.
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