Bonum Certa Men Certa

When It Comes to Encryption, The Web (as in World Wide Web) Isn't Secure and Uses Weak Ciphers About as Often as Every Day, Even in 2024

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Oct 04, 2024,
updated Oct 04, 2024

Security: Adoption of TLS 1.3 for Secure Web Communication Grows

Gemini Protocol does not

TODAY we've noticed that Lupa says "97% of the [Gemini] capsules use TLS 1.3" - that's way more than the Web!

To quote recent surveys [1, 2]:

TLS Certificates Statistics October 2024

62.1% of Sites Support the Latest TLS 1.3 Protocol

Similar numbers from another survey of the Web:

As can be seen, of all 135,000+ probed sites the percentage of TLS 1.3 support is about 63.5%

For those of us who aren't cryptography geeks (like Julian Assange is), what does this mean? Well, to quote recent critique of TLS 1.2: "According to the 2021 TLS Telemetry Report, TLS 1.3 is the chosen encryption protocol for the majority of web servers among the top million. Almost 63% of servers prefer TLS 1.3 to other protocols as of August 2021. [...] TLS 1.2 uses a complex cipher suite that includes support for encryption algorithms and ciphers with known cryptographic weaknesses. While the complexity results in the poor choice of the cipher suite, support for weak security mechanisms amplifies the risks of encryption attacks. To address these issues, TLS 1.3 uses a simple cipher suite that supports only those algorithms and ciphers that currently have no known vulnerabilities. It has dropped support for SHA-1, RSA key exchanges, the RC4 cipher, CBC-mode ciphers, MD5, and a few more that can potentially cause downgrade attacks."

In Geminispace the usage of TLS 1.2 is rather rare. It'll probably be extinct in a year or two. Gemini is casually and even nonchalantly mocked for being "old-like" or "antique", but it's actually way ahead where it matters. And yes, it can run on very old and under-powered devices, unlike "modern" browsers.

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