On Thursday, October 10, 2013, Salz, Rich wrote: > > TLS was designed to support multiple ciphersuites. Unfortunately this > opened the door > > to downgrade attacks, and transitioning to protocol versions that > wouldn't do this was nontrivial. > > The ciphersuites included all shared certain misfeatures, leading to the > current situation. > > On the other hand, negotiation let us deploy it in places where > full-strength cryptography is/was regulated. > > Sometimes half a loaf is better than nothing.
The last time various SSL/TLS ciphersuites needed to be removed from webserver configurations when I managed a datacenter some years ago led to the following 'failure modes', either from the user's browser now warning or refusing to connect to a server using an insecure cipher suite, or when the only cipher suites used by a server weren't supported by an old browser (or both at once): 1) for sites that had low barriers to switching, loss of traffic/customers to sites that didn't drop the insecure ciphersuites 2) for sites that are harder to leave (your bank, google/facebook level sticky public ones [less common]), large increases in calls to support, with large costs for the business. Non-PCI compliant businesses taking CC payments are generally so insecure that customers that fled to them really are uppung their chances of suffering fraud. In both cases you have a net decrease of security and an increase of fraud and financial loss. So in some cases anything less than a whole loaf, which you can't guarantee for N years of time, isn't 'good enough.' In other words, we are screwed no matter what. -David Mercer -- David Mercer - http://dmercer.tumblr.com IM: AIM: MathHippy Yahoo/MSN: n0tmusic Facebook/Twitter/Google+/Linkedin: radix42 FAX: +1-801-877-4351 - BlackBerry PIN: 332004F7 PGP Public Key: http://davidmercer.nfshost.com/radix42.pubkey.txt Fingerprint: A24F 5816 2B08 5B37 5096 9F52 B182 3349 0F23 225B
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