Certificate revocation is intended to convey a complete withdrawal of trust in an SSL certificate and thereby protect the people using a site against fraud, eavesdropping, and theft. However, some contemporary browsers handle certificate revocation so carelessly that the most frequent users of a site and even its administrators can continue using an revoked certificate for weeks or months without knowing anything is amiss. Recently, this situation was clearly illustrated when a busy e-commerce site was still using an intermediate certificate more than a week after its revocation.

SSL Certificates are used to secure communication between browsers and websites by providing a key with which to encrypt the traffic and by providing third-party verification of the identity of the certificate owner. There are varying levels of verification a third-party Certificate Authority (CA) may carry out, ranging from just confirming control of the domain name (Domain Validation [DV]) to more extensive identity checks (Extended Validation [EV]).

However, an SSL certificate — or any of the certificates which form a chain from the server's certificate to a trusted root installed in the browser or operating system — may need to be revoked. A certificate should be revoked when it has had its private key compromised; the owner of the certificate no longer controls the domain for which it was issued; or the certificate was mistakenly signed. An attacker with access to an un-revoked certificate who also has access to the certificate's private key can perform a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack by presenting the certificate to unsuspecting users whose browsers will behave as if they were connecting to a legitimate site.

There are two main technologies for browsers to check the revocation status of a particular certificate: using the Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP) or looking up the certificate in a Certificate Revocation List (CRL). OCSP provides revocation information about an individual certificate from an issuing CA, whereas CRLs provide a list of revoked certificates and may be received by clients less frequently. Browser support for the two forms of revocation varies from no checking at all to the use of both methods where necessary.

On 30th April 2013 an intermediate certificate issued to Network Associates — which forms part of the chain from an individual certificate back to a trusted root — was revoked by RSA. The intermediate certificate was used to sign multiple McAfee SSL certificates including one for a busy e-commerce website, www.mcafeestore.com. Its revocation should have prevented access to all of the websites using the intermediate including the online store. However, more than a week later nobody had noticed: no tweets or news articles appeared and the certificate was still in place.

The certificate chain for mcafeestore.com, before it was replaced. The highlighted certificate, NAI SSL CA v1, was revoked on 30th April 2013

The intermediate certificate was revoked by RSA by adding its serial number, 54:99:05:bd:ca:2a:ad:e3:82:21:95:d6:aa:ee:b6:5a, to the corresponding CRL. None of the certificates in the chain provide a URL for OCSP, so using the CRL is the only option available. After the CRL was published, browsers should display an error message and prevent access to the website. The reality is somewhat different, however.

Business as usual in Firefox

Firefox does not download CRLs for websites which use the most popular types of SSL certificate (all types of certificate except EV which is usually displayed with a green bar). Without downloading the CRL, Firefox is happy to carry on as usual; letting people visit the website and transfer sensitive personal information relying on a certificate that is no longer valid. In any case even if OCSP were available, by default Firefox will only check the validity of the server's certificate and not attempt to check the entire chain of certificates (again, except for EV certificates).

No warnings for mobile users either on Android or iOS

Mobile browsing now makes up a significant proportion of internet use. Neither Google Chrome on Android nor Safari on iOS present a warning to the user even after being reset. Safari on iOS does not make revocation checks at all except for Extended Validation certificates and did not make requests for the CRL which would have triggered the revocation error message.

Google Chrome: [left to right] default settings, revocation checks enabled on Windows, and revocation checks enabled on Linux

Google Chrome, by default, does not make standard revocation checks for non-EV certificates. Google does aggregate a limited number of CRLs and distributes this via its update mechanism but, at least currently, it does not list the certificate in question or indeed any of the other certificates revoked in the same CRL. For the majority of Chrome users with the default settings, as with Firefox, nothing will appear to be amiss.

For the security conscious, Google Chrome does have the option to enable proper revocation checks, but in this case the end result depends on the platform. On Windows, Google Chrome can make use of Microsoft's CryptoAPI to fetch the CRL and it correctly prevents access to the site. However, RSA's CRL is not delivered in the conventional way: instead of providing the CRL in a binary format, it is encoded into a text-based format which is not the accepted standard. Mozilla's NSS — which is used by Firefox on all platforms and by Google Chrome on Linux — does not support the format. On Linux, Google Chrome does make a request for the CRL but cannot process the response and instead carries on as normal.

Warning to potential customers when visiting the store at https://www.mcafeestore.com

Microsoft's web browser, Internet Explorer is one of the most secure browsers in this context. It fetches revocation information (with a preference for OCSP, but will fallback to CRLs) for the server's certificate and the rest of the certificate chain and, as a consequence of the revocation check, it prevents the user from making their purchase on www.mcafeestore.com.

Opera preventing access to the website

Along with Internet Explorer, Opera is secure by default: it prevents access to the webpage. Opera checks the entirety of the certificate chain using either OCSP or CRLs where appropriate.

However, even with the most secure browser, the most frequent users of a secure website may be able to continue using a website for weeks or months despite one of the certificates in the chain of trust having been revoked. The CRL used in this case can be cached for up to 6 months, leaving frequent users, who will have a cached copy of the CRL, in the dark about the revocation. Going by previous copies of the CRL, the CRL may have last been generated in January 2013 and valid until July 2013. If that is the case and you have visited any website using the same intermediate certificate your browser will not display any warnings and will behave as if the certificate has not been revoked. However, you need not have visited mcafeestore.com before to have a cached CRL; there were 14 other websites with the same intermediate certificate in Netcraft's latest SSL survey.

As long as six months sounds to miss out on important revocation information, browser vendors in control of the list of trusted CAs allow CRLs to have 12-month validity periods when destined for intermediate certificates. CRLs covering individual, or subscriber, certificates are required to be valid for at most 10 days. By its very nature access to the private key corresponding to an intermediate certificate is more useful to an attacker: he can use the private key to sign a certificate for any website he so chooses rather than having access to just a single site. Browsers do have the ability to distrust certificates if they become aware of the compromise, but they may depend on slow update mechanisms to update the trusted set of certificates.

Whilst it may be expensive for an online store to be using a certificate that should not be valid, the consequences for governmental or banking websites could be more severe. If the certificate, or one of the certificates in the chain, were revoked due to a key compromise and there is an active attacker exploiting the lack of revocation checking in modern browsers, the public could be at risk for an extended period of time. The state of revocation amongst modern browsers is sufficiently fragmented to ensure that the entire concept of revocation is on shaky ground — without consistent behaviour and timely updates, if or when the certificate is finally blocked it is too late.

Netcraft waited until the certificate was replaced before publishing this article.

Early last week, Netcraft blocked a website purporting to offer online support for eBay customers. The website made use of a third-party live chat service provided by Volusion, an e-commerce outfit which also provides both free and premium hosted live chat services. By running a live chat service and asking the right questions, a fraudster could coax an unsuspecting victim into revealing sensitive information in addition to their eBay login credentials.

The agent providing "support" claimed that the chat was accessed by clicking a live chat button in eBay's order confirmation email. When Netcraft attempted to question the legitimacy of the live chat, the agent immediately disconnected. eBay's official live chat service is available to eBay members through a secure page on an ebay.com subdomain and is linked to from the eBay website.

Later, the site showed a place-holder company logo and the eBay branding had disappeared.

This attack is interesting as several well-known companies outsource their live chat support, including Sky, a British broadcaster and ISP (LivePerson), Western Union (Oracle), and Rackspace (BoldChat). This, combined with a valid SSL certificate, could be convincing enough to deceive people accustomed to seeing third-party domain names for live chat applications. In addition, free or trial deployments can be obtained for these third-party services quickly — some without identification or credit cards — allowing a social engineer to carry out this attack easily and anonymously.

Live chat social engineering is not a novel technique for fraudsters: last December, a replacement Kindle was falsely ordered via the official Amazon live chat by a fraudster with only limited knowledge of the victim. A similar scam was seen in February this year. A forum dedicated to social engineering has a thread allegedly making offers to buy Amazon order numbers, which could be used in future attacks.

Netcraft advises people to never reveal sensitive information such as passwords or PINs in live chats, even if asked. A legitimate company will not require this information. If in doubt, challenge them to verify who they say they are. Only access live chats from companies' own sites: do not access them from third-party websites or emails.

You can protect yourself against the latest phishing attacks by installing Netcraft's Anti-Phishing Extension and help protect the internet community by reporting potential phishing sites to Netcraft by email to scam@netcraft.com or at http://toolbar.netcraft.com/report_url. Netcraft can also help protect both brand owners and hosting companies.

Bitcoin, a distributed digital currency that cryptographically verifies transactions, has recently seen a large increase in usage — the total amount of Bitcoins in circulation is now well over $1B US Dollars and each Bitcoin is today worth more than $100. By way of comparison, Gibraltar — a British Overseas Territory and a conventional tax haven — had an economy worth an estimated $1.275B in 2008.

Speculators, investors, and criminals alike have been drawn to the alternative currency in the hopes of exploiting its anonymity, its almost exponential rising exchange rate against conventional currencies, and its dominant position amongst non-governmental currencies. Its attraction to criminals is diverse: it has become the de facto equivalent of cash facilitating anonymous purchases of illegal goods, and the dramatic increase in the value of each Bitcoin has meant that Bitcoin wallets have become increasingly attractive targets for would-be phishers.

A recent phishing attack against the leading Bitcoin Exchange, Mt. Gox

Bitcoin users are no strangers to being targeted by criminals: last month, attackers were able to steal $12,000 worth of Bitcoins from Bitinstant, a Bitcoin transaction services company, by obtaining the credentials for a brokerage account after socially engineering access to their emails. Malware writers have also targeted Bitcoins: Infostealer.Coinbit is a Trojan horse that tries to steal Bitcoin wallets. Criminals have also been using networks of infected computers to mine Bitcoins for themselves.

Bitcoin exchanges, organisations converting between Bitcoins and conventional currencies, are an obvious target for fraudsters. Last Thursday Mt. Gox (the leading Bitcoin exchange) faced a “stronger than average” DDoS attack. In September 2012 Bitfloor (another Bitcoin exchange) suspended operations after the theft of ~24,000 BTC (worth $250,000 at the time), and the Bitcoin exchange, Bitcoinica, went out of business after also suffering from large thefts.

Despite the apparent risk of operating in this business, some organisations are promoting a laissez-faire attitude to security to the Bitcoin community: BitPay recommends that merchants "[..] can eliminate the need for PCI Compliance and expensive security measures" by replacing credit card transactions with Bitcoin-based solutions.

Netcraft can provide Phishing Site Takedown and Countermeasures services, PCI Approved Vulnerability Scanning and Penetration Testing to Bitcoin exchanges, merchants, and e-commerce sites. For more information, please contact sales@netcraft.com. Internet users can be protected against phishing sites, Bitcoin-related or otherwise, by Netcraft's Anti-Phishing Extension. Help protect the internet community by reporting potential phishing sites to Netcraft by email to scam@netcraft.com or at http://toolbar.netcraft.com/report_url.

Netcraft began its Web Server Survey in 1995 and has tracked the deployment of a wide range of scripting technologies across the web since 2001. One such technology is PHP, which Netcraft presently finds on well over 200 million websites.

The first version of PHP was named Personal Home Page Tools (PHP Tools) when it was released by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1995. PHP 1 can still be downloaded today from museum.php.net. Weighing in at only 26 kilobytes in size, php-108.tar.gz is diminutive by today's standards, yet it was capable of allowing users to implement guestbooks and other form-processing applications.

PHP 2 introduced built-in support for accessing databases, cookie handling, and user-defined functions. It was released in 1997, and by the following year, around 1% of sites on the internet were using PHP.

However, PHP 3 was the first release to closely resemble today's incarnation of PHP. A rewrite of the underlying parser by Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski led to what was arguably a different language; accordingly, it was renamed to simply PHP, which was a recursive acronym for "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor". This was released in 1998 and the ease of extending the language played a large part in its tremendous success, as this aspect attracted dozens of developers to submit a variety of modules.

Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski continued to rewrite PHP's core, primarily to improve performance and increase the modularity of the codebase. This led to the creation of the Zend Engine, which was used by PHP 4 when it was released in 2000. As well as offering better performance, PHP 4 could be used with more web servers, supported HTTP sessions, output buffering and several new language constructs.

By September 2001, Netcraft's Web Server Survey found 1.8M sites running PHP.

PHP 5 was released in 2004, and remains the most recent major version release today (5.4.11 was released on 17 January 2013). Zend Engine 2.0 forms the core of this release.

By January 2013, PHP was being used by a remarkable 244M sites, meaning that 39% of sites in Netcraft's Web Server Survey were running PHP. Of sites that run PHP, 78% are served from Linux computers, followed by 8% on FreeBSD. Precompiled Windows binaries can also be downloaded from windows.php.net, which has helped Windows account for over 7% of PHP sites.

Popular web applications that use PHP include content management systems such as WordPress, Joomla and Drupal, along with several popular ecommerce solutions like Zencart, osCommerce and Magento. In January 2013, these six applications alone were found running on a total of 32M sites worldwide.

PHP also demonstrates a strong installation base across web-facing computers that are found as part of Netcraft's Computer Counting survey. Just as an individual IP address is capable of hosting many websites, an individual computer can also be configured to have multiple IP addresses. This survey allows us to identify unique web-facing computers and which operating systems they use regardless of how many sites or IP addresses they have. As of January 2013, 2.1M out of 4.3M web-facing computers are running PHP.

PHP has also become a victim of its own success in some respects: With so many servers running PHP, and with so many different web applications authored in PHP, hackers are presented with a huge and rather attractive attack surface. Because it is so easy to get started with programming in PHP, it attracts all levels of developers, many of whom may produce insecure applications through lack of experience and attention to detail. Netcraft's anti-phishing services find wave upon wave of phishing attacks hosted on compromised PHP applications, and the U.S. NVD (National Vulnerability Database) contains several thousand unique vulnerabilities that relate either to PHP itself, or to applications written in PHP.

Methodology

The full list of hostnames from the Netcraft Web Server Survey forms the basis of our technology tracking. We make requests to each of these sites, or if there is a large number of sites hosted on a single IP address, we employ a proportional sampling technique. The content of each page and its HTTP headers are analysed to determine which technologies are being used. For PHP, we look for references to .php filename extensions or the existence of HTTP response headers like "X-Powered-By: PHP". Additional signature tests are used to identify particular PHP applications, such as WordPress.

Each metric is then calculated as follows:

For each IP address, we estimate the total number of PHP sites it serves by calculating the product of the proportion of sampled hostnames that are running PHP and the total number of hostnames on that IP address. In cases where the IP address is serving 100 or fewer sites, all sites will be sampled and thus be representative of the entire population for that IP address.

To provide a more meaningful metric which counts the number of human-generated sites actively using PHP, our active site count excludes spam sites or other computer-generated content. This methodology is described in more detail here.

This metric counts the number of unique IP addresses where at least one hostname in its sample set was found to be running PHP.

A single physical or virtual computer may have more than one IP address. We are able to identify unique computers that are exposed to the internet via multiple IP addresses. If an IP address is running PHP, then the computer associated with it is marked as running PHP. Further details of this methodology are explained in our Hosting Provider Server Count.

Just over two years since its launch, the CloudFlare content distribution network is being actively used to accelerate traffic to more than 235,000 websites in Netcraft's Web Server Survey. In total, we found 785,000 sites currently configured to use CloudFlare's DNS servers. Once a domain has been configured to use these servers, any of its subdomains can be routed through the CloudFlare system at the click of a button. Paying customers can also route their traffic through CloudFlare by setting up a CNAME within their own DNS.

CloudFlare's network is globally spread across 23 datacenters, half of which are entirely remotely operated. Nine of these datacenters were opened during a month-long expansion effort which ended in August and resulted in a 70% increase in network capacity. CloudFlare's content distribution network spreads website content around these datacenters, allowing visitors to request pages from geographically closer locations. This typically reduces the number of network hops, resulting in an average request taking less than 30ms.

In addition to moving static files closer to visitors, CloudFlare also offers an automatic web optimisation feature called Rocket Loader. This combines multiple JavaScript files into a single request, which saves both time and bandwidth. Pro, Business and Enterprise users can also enable beta support for SPDY requests, which achieve better latency than HTTP through the use of compression, multiplexing and prioritisation.

In October, CloudFlare introduced support for OCSP stapling, which it claims has increased the speed of SSL requests by 30%. The Online Certificate Status Protocol allows browsers to ask a certificate authority (CA) whether an SSL certificate it has issued has been revoked. Handling these requests in realtime can be challenging, particularly if the CA has issued a large number of certificates, or has issued certificates to extremely busy websites. OCSP stapling solves this problem by delivering the OCSP response directly from CloudFlare's network, removing the need for the browser to perform an additional DNS lookup and send a request to the CA's own OCSP server. OCSP performance is often overlooked when considering which CA to buy a certificate from, but can have a crucial impact on the overall performance of a customer's website.

With its insight into the kind of requests being sent to many different websites, CloudFlare is well-positioned to identify malicious traffic and provide protection to all of its customers. Depending on which level of security is enabled, CloudFlare can deny requests which are attempting SQL injection attacks, comment spam, excessive crawling, email harvesting, or exploiting cross-site scripting vulnerabilities. Business and Enterprise users can also benefit from CloudFlare's advanced DDoS (distributed denial of service) protection.

CloudFlare's growth accelerated significantly in the summer of last year. This is when many people first became aware of the service, after it was used to handle traffic for the Lulz Security website. High profile attacks against Sony, Fox, PBS and the X Factor helped LulzSec garner 350,000 followers on Twitter, where it extolled the virtues of using CloudFlare to mitigate DDoS attacks.

Some notable high-traffic users of CloudFlare include The Hacker News, Uber Humor, Android firmware site Cyanogen Mod, and the content management system Moodle.