Andrew Ayer

Google recently announced that they will be phasing out support for SHA-1 SSL certificates in Chrome, commencing almost immediately. Although Microsoft was the first to announce the deprecation of SHA-1 certificates, Google's approach is much more aggressive than Microsoft's, and will start treating SHA-1 certificates differently well before the January 1, 2017 deadline imposed by Microsoft. A five year SHA-1 certificate purchased after January 1, 2012 will be treated by Chrome as "affirmatively insecure" starting in the first half of 2015.

This has raised the hackles of Matthew Prince, CEO of CloudFlare. In a comment on Hacker News, Matthew cites the "startling" number of browsers that don't support SHA-2 certificates (namely, pre-SP3 Windows XP and pre-2.3 Android) and expresses his concern that the aggressive deprecation of SHA-1 will lead to organizations declining to support HTTPS. This comment resulted in a very interesting exchange between him and Adam Langley, TLS expert and security engineer at Google, who, as you'd expect, supports Google's aggressive deprecation plan.

Matthew raises legitimate concerns. We're at a unique point in history: there is incredible momentum behind converting sites to HTTPS, even sites that traditionally would not have used HTTPS, such as entirely static sites. The SHA-1 deprecation might throw a wrench into this and cause site operators to reconsider switching to HTTPS. Normally I have no qualms with breaking some compatibility eggs to make a better security omelette, but I'm deeply ambivalent about the timeframe of this deprecation. Losing the HTTPS momentum would be incredibly sad, especially since switching to HTTPS provides an immediate defense against large-scale passive eavesdropping.

Of course, Adam raises a very good point when he asks "if Microsoft's 2016/2017 deadline is reckless, what SHA-1 deprecation date would be right by your measure?" In truth, the Internet should have already moved away from SHA-1 certificates. Delaying the deprecation further hardly seems like a good idea.

Ultimately, there may be no good answer to this question, and it's really just bad luck and bad timing that this needs to happen right when HTTPS is picking up momentum.

This affects me as more than just a site operator, since I resell SSL certificates over at SSLMate. Sadly, SSLMate's upstream certificate authority, RapidSSL, does not currently support SHA-2 certificates, and has not provided a definite timeframe for adding support. RapidSSL is not alone: Gandi does not support SHA-2 either, and GoDaddy's SHA-2 support is purportedly a little bumpy. The fact that certificate authorities are not all ready for this change makes Google's aggressive deprecation schedule all the more stressful. On the other hand, I expect RapidSSL to add SHA-2 support soon in response to Google's announcement. If I'm correct, it will certainly show the upside of an aggressive deprecation in getting lethargic players to act.

In the meantime, SSLMate will continue to sell SHA-1 certificates, though it will probably stop selling certificates that are valid for more than one or two years. Switching to a certificate authority that already supports SHA-2 is out of the question, since they are either significantly more expensive or take a long time to issue certificates, which doesn't work with SSLMate's model of real time purchases from the command line. When RapidSSL finally adds SHA-2 support, SSLMate customers will be able to replace their existing SHA-1 certificates for free, and SSLMate will do its best to make this process as easy as possible.

Speaking of certificate lifetimes, Adam Langley made the case in the Hacker News thread that site operators should purchase certificates that last only a year. I agree heartily. In addition to Adam's point that short-lived certificates insulate site operators from changes like the SHA-1 deprecation, I'd like to add that they're more secure because certificate revocation doesn't really work. If your private key is compromised, you're not truly safe until your certificate expires, so the shorter the lifetime the better. The main argument against short-lived certificates has always been that they're really inconvenient, so I'm happy to say that at SSLMate I'm working on some very exciting features that will make yearly certificate renewals extremely easy. Stay tuned for an announcement next week.