nCipher and Verisign today launched the world's first hardware SSL certificates. An SSL certificate stored in dedicated cryptographic hardware initially seems superfluous, but there are some bona fide advantages. (more...)

The Apache Project have announced that versions of Apache/2.0 up to and including Apache/2.0.44 are vulnerable to a denial of service attack. To fix the problem, the project has released Apache/2.0.45 which is available for download.

People running Apache servers should note that the vulnerability only applies to Apache/2.0 and not Apache/1.3. In this respect the bug is not a big threat to the stability of the web - it is a denial of service rather than a remote compromise and the number of sites running Apache/2.0 is relatively small. Almost 99% of Apache sites are on Apache/1.3 or earlier.

Since we started the Web Server Survey in 1995, a longstanding theme of Netcraft's internet exploration work has been the issue of how best to reassure webmasters and systems administrators that requests they may see originating from Netcraft's network are benign, and do not in any way convey aggressive intent.

Earlier today an RFC was published by Internet pioneer Steve Bellovin which addresses this scenario. Bellovin's idea is that the sender's intentions, whether good or bad, should be stated directly in the TCP header information using a security flag [termed the "evil bit" by Bellovin]. It is intended that network protection devices such as routers, firewalls and Intrusion Detection Systems should defend their networks against packets where the evil bit is set, but otherwise assume that traffic is benign. Groups aligning themselves with RFC 3514 include the FreeBSD project, [who have already coded an implementation] and the nmap scanner.

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