The recent DigiNotar and Comodo Certificate Authority (CA) security breaches have once again highlighted the need to create standards for stronger security around SSL business operations and authentication processes.  At Symantec, we believe that the industry needs to work together to develop stronger security policies and procedures in three areas and then implement third party monitoring of adherence to these policies by the CA community.  These three areas are:

1.     CA Infrastructure:  Rigorous and diligent upkeep of CA security infrastructure is critical, components of which include:

·       Specifically-designed hardened facilities and physical security measures to defend against attacks

·       Hardware-based cryptographic signature systems

·       Regular third party...

This is the second part of a two-part series on the proper management of SSL Certificates.

In Part I of this series, we discussed some of the risks and implications of poorly managed SSL Certificates.  When SSL Certificates expire or become compromised, the need to rectify the situation quickly is paramount. Take the example of a recent incident where a Certificate Authority (CA) was compromised. Customers of that CA may want to take appropriate actions quickly to minimize any cascading impact from that security breach. Unfortunately, if the customers do not have a robust SSL Certificate Management System, they may not know their level of threat exposure.

Many organizations recognize the risks and implications of out-of-status SSL certificates....

On August 17th eWeek ran an article that described how improper SSL implementations can leave websites vulnerable to various cyber attacks.  While this story is spot-on, what is equally important to consider is the proper management of SSL Certificates. The mismanagement of SSL Certificates can lead to financial loss and lack of credibility for your organization.

One particular challenge that enterprises face can be having hundreds of SSL Certificates and no proper SSL Certificate management tool. The status of each certificate is usually tracked manually on a spreadsheet or through some other manual mechanism.  Manual mechanisms are prone to human error, and what’s more, data is difficult to track when IT personnel changes.  In addition, it isn’t unheard of for an SSL Certificate to expire in the middle of the mess.

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Yesterday, an independent researcher claimed in his blog to have successfully exploited vulnerabilities in the way LinkedIn handles and transmits cookies over SSL (see blog at http://www.wtfuzz.com/blogs/linkedin-ssl-cookie-vulnerability). According to the blog, one of the problems is the availability of cookies sent in plain text over unencrypted channels of communication, which is due to SSL cookies not having a secure flag set, as well as appearing to contain session tokens.

"An attacker may be able to perform a man in the middle (MITM) attack, and thus capture these cookies from an established Linkedin session." said the researcher.

This type of attack is similar to how Firesheep, a Firefox plug-in that was released in October 2010, enabled hackers to hijack information from other users on the same unsecured Wi-Fi. The most notable...