Highlights
January trends
As the SSL survey enters 2009, the total number of valid third party SSL certificates exceeds one million for the first time. This total has grown by 18,129 to 1,014,301.
Go Daddy shows the largest growth this month, gaining 9,311 sites, which takes its market share up by a further 0.51 percentage points to 23.4%. Meanwhile, VeriSign exhibits smaller growth of 2,624 sites, which brings its market share down by 0.60 percentage points. This reduces VeriSign's share to 47.5%, but this is still more than twice as large as Go Daddy's share. Comodo's growth of 3,535 sites exceeds VeriSign's growth, and brings its market share up to 15.4% (+0.07).
Domain-validated certificates
Go Daddy extends its recent lead in domain-validated certificates, gaining a further 9,100 certificates, which takes its share up to 47.4%, compared with VeriSign's share of 44.4%. Both companies have a strong foothold in the domain-validated certificate market, with Comodo following with only 4.2%.
Organisation certificates
VeriSign continues to lead in organisation certificates, but its market share falls just below half for the first time. Nonetheless, with a 49.8% share, VeriSign is still far ahead of Comodo, which takes second place with 25.8%. Go Daddy has a much smaller presence in organisation certificates, taking only 2.1% of the market share.
Extended validation certificates
VeriSign's market share of EV SSL certificates has hovered around three-quarters for more than a year, demonstrating that VeriSign regularly exceeds the growth of all its competitors combined. This month sees VeriSign's total rise by 505 certificates, while the entire market (including VeriSign) grew by 672 to a total of 10,928. Comodo remains in second place overall with a 9.4% share and shows the second largest growth, rising by 74 to 1,024.
Google Chrome adds HTTPS-only browsing mode
Build
156.1 of Chrome 2 includes a new HTTPS-only browsing mode, in which it
will only load HTTPS sites. This mode is activated by executing Chrome with the --force-https
flag. Whilst operating in this mode, Chrome will not load any sites with SSL
certificate errors.
Certstar erroneously issues SSL certificate for mozilla.com
Eddy Nigg describes on his blog how he was able to obtain a legitimate certificate issued to mozilla.com without any questions being asked or verification checks being performed. Mozilla subsequently filed the incident for investigation, noting that the certificate was "Domain Control Validated" and that Eddy Nigg did not in fact control the mozilla.com domain.
In a followup post, Nigg details the steps he took to obtain the certificate from Certstar — a Comodo reseller — and points out the lack of validation. A systems adminstrator at Mozilla also claimed that Certstar has been endlessly spamming webmaster@mozilla.org since the beginning of December, falsely claiming that one of their SSL certificates had expired and needed to be renewed.
MD5-signed certificates demonstrably vulnerable
While the MD5 hash algorithm has been known to be vulnerable to collision attacks for some time, security researchers have successfully exploited this weakness to produce a fake certificate authority certificate signed by Equifax.
The researchers submitted valid certificate requests to the certificate authority, while producing a second certificate that had the same signature but entirely different details. When the CA signed the valid certificate, the signature applied also to the invalid certificate, allowing the researchers to spoof any secure website that they liked. This attack is the first practical use against SSL of already-known attacks against the MD5 checksum algorithm.
Last month's survey found more than 130,000 valid third party certificates using MD5 signatures on public web sites, which is around 14% of the total number of valid SSL certificates in use. The great majority consisted of certificates from RapidSSL (shown as Equifax on the certificate). All of the 128,000 RapidSSL certificates in use on public sites were signed with MD5. There were also some much smaller CAs that used MD5, as well as a small number of certificates from Thawte and VeriSign.
Verisign (owners of RapidSSL since 2006) have stated that they have stopped using MD5-signing for RapidSSL certificates, and will have phased out MD5-signing across all their certificate products by the end of January 2009. Once it is impossible to obtain new certificates signed with MD5, this attack will be neutralised.
The attack requires a collision between newly created certificates — one valid and one fake — deliberately created by the attacker. As such, there is no particular risk to existing SSL certificates signed with MD5, and they do not need to be replaced. VeriSign are nevertheless offering free replacements for customers that want them. It would be prudent for customers to take up such offers, as CERT have issued a vulnerability note suggesting that users could manually check for MD5-signed certificates.
Because the Extended Validation standard requires SHA1 (or better) signatures, EV certificates have been unaffected by this issue. There are no MD5-signed EV certificates found by our survey.
Widespread OpenSSL vulnerability
New vulnerabilities were discovered in multiple programs using the OpenSSL cryptography library. Due to a common mistake in checking return values from functions checking digital signatures, several programs may be vulnerable to spoofing of digital signatures.
The most important affected program was ISC Bind, which is the most widely used DNS server on the internet. A flaw in its validation of signatures on DNSSEC replies meant that the server may be vulnerable to DNS spoofing attacks even where DNSSEC is in use. Bind have released BIND 9.6.0-P1 to fix this bug.
The common mistake is in the checking of return values from functions in OpenSSL that check digital signatures. Programmers have failed to allow for all the possible return values of the EVP_VerifyFinal function, and as a result some cases where the signature has not been successfully checked can be mistakenly treated as successfully verified.
OpenSSL's developers also made the same mistake in their own code. OpenSSL 0.9.8j was released yesterday to fix a number of bugs within the OpenSSL library where signatures could be accepted incorrectly. According to the OpenSSL advisory, these bugs affect the signature checks on DSA and ECDSA keys used with SSL/TLS. Clients using unpatched versions of OpenSSL are vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks when connecting to SSL/HTTPS servers with DSA certificates. Fortunately, DSA certificates are very rare on websites and we find only 31 third-party-validated DSA certificates in our survey.
Other news
- Comodo extends its Unified Communications Certificate range to include a UC certificate that is valid for three years.
- Comodo partners with UK payment provider PayPoint.net, offering discounted certificates to PayPoint.net customers.
Key Survey Metrics
1014301 valid third-party certificates were found this month. 2706190 sites were able to respond to an SSL request, with only 39.9% having valid third party certificates.
Survey Perspective
The Netcraft Secure Server Survey examines the use of encrypted transactions on the Web through extensive automated exploration of the Internet. Its intent is to provide answers to questions such as:
- How many companies are doing encrypted transactions over the Internet?
- Who are they?
- Where are they?
- Whose server software do they use?
- Which authority do they obtain their certificates from?
- What web hosters do they use?
We anticipate that this analysis will help the certification, server and SSL accelerator industries to identify and understand the user community and their applications.
About Netcraft
Netcraft is a British Internet consultancy company. Founded in 1988, it offers a range of services such as Internet Research, World Wide Web Publishing, Network Security, and Contract Systems & Network Management to customers which include Hewlett Packard, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems.
In mid 1995, Netcraft began its Web Server Survey, initially as a capability statement. Each month Netcraft conduct an automated exploration of the Internet, looking for hosts that may be offering http services, and in the last few days of the month, send an http request to each site to discover what server software is being used. The Netcraft Web Server Survey has become the web server industry reference for Internet connected sites. The SSL server survey started in 1996, providing an equivalent monthly snapshot for the use of HTTPS on the Internet.
Motivation
The use of encrypted transactions on the Internet, and the whole Electronic Commerce spectrum, have been the subject of considerable media attention since early 1995. Since then, electronic commerce and the general use of encrypted transactions on the Internet have grown enormously, although not always steadily. By quantifying the growth, this survey complements media coverage which is sometimes exaggerated: for example the widely reported slowdown in e-commerce after the bubble of 1999 and 2000 appear in this Survey merely as a reduced rate of growth.
Jurisdictional Background
Different governments' legislation impacts upon people's ability to make use of encrypted transactions. For several years the early development of the SSL market was significantly affected by the US government's export legislation which, at that time, made it impossible to export software containing effective cryptography from the US. Initially, US vendors had to ship "export grade" versions of their software with weak encryption to overseas markets. US rules have now changed, and make it much easier for US vendors to export to most countries.
Another significant historical feature was the US patent on RSA. RSA is an important and widely used public key encryption algorithm, which was patented in the US, but not elsewhere. This caused some distortions in the uptake of encryption products at the time, but since the patent expired in September 2000, most encryption vendors are now able to use the same RSA code both in the USA and elsewhere.
Internationally, many other jurisdictions have quirks restricting the export, import, sale, or use of https servers. For example, the UK does not currently have any specific laws pertaining to software containing strong cryptography, but advice from the Department of Trade & Industry suggests that SSL servers would fall within the definition of "high technology" and export to a "denied list" of countries, including Iraq & Iran, would be restricted.
Several countries, including Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, and parts of the former Soviet Union have laws restricting the use of cryptographic products. Professional advice would be especially useful if considering operating in these jurisdictions.
Types of Secure Servers
All responses obtained by the survey are subject to the same 3 criteria that a typical web browser will apply when connecting to a secure website:
- Is this certificate issued by a recognised certificate authority? (as opposed to an unknown issuer, or a self-signed certificate)
- Does it correspond to a valid website name?
- Is it valid (not expired) at this time?
Certificate Trustworthiness
Although we give some overall figures for all sites visited by the survey, most of the survey data presented is for valid sites — that is, distinct sites (in effect, distinct SSL certificates, identifying distinct businesses or organisations) that would work without warnings in a typical user's web browser. See the methodology for details.
How many people are using SSL?
In the first Secure Server Survey in November 1996 we found 3,239 sites which responded to our SSL request with a certificate valid for the site name we used. The number of distinct SSL websites (as measured by the number of distinct, valid certificates) was more than 100,000 by the end of 2000. Steady growth of around 30% per annum has been seen in recent years.
Valid Certificates
(Recent numbers subdivided by type of validation)
Who is using https and where are they?
One of the features of the survey is that it is possible to include the decrypted responses from the sites with trustworthy certificates. These have been organised by geographical location, by server software, by server vendor, by operating system, and by operating system group. The geographical location is derived from the address in the certificate rather than the domain name.
The striking thing from a geographical perspective is the degree to which the sites are concentrated in the USA: excluding sites with where no country is specified, 50% of the sites are based there. Its share has been declining, however, as e-commerce has grown in worldwide popularity.
What do people use it for?
Business and application areas vary enormously. Applications include website login forms, online retail, online brokerage, payment gateway services, online banking, gambling and charity donations. There are also many less public uses of the technology; organisations may choose to communicate with their overseas offices and close business partners using encrypted web servers.
Which server software do they use?
Netscape once dominated the encrypted server market, and in November 1996 slightly over half of the Internet https sites used one of Netscape's servers. Since Netscape designed the SSL protocol, and developed the first servers, which were without competition for several months, Netscape's early lead in market share was to be expected. However, Microsoft soon caught up and passed Netscape in site numbers, and was the most popular SSL server product throughout the dot com era.
The most popular choice of SSL web servers is the open source Apache server. This is distributed with and supported by all the main Linux distributions, as well as FreeBSD. And a number of other common servers found by the survey are commercial products from other vendors derived from Apache (such as IBM's HTTP server).
Which operating system do they use?
A number of new Windows sites appeared in the early part of 2000, taking the total Windows share just over 50%, mainly at the expense of those operating systems we have classified under "Others", while also diluting the shares of Solaris and BSD. Windows share remained at around 52% for several years, but has started to decline in the last few years as Linux has grown in popularity.
Whose Certificates do sites use?
Verisign has dominated the certificate market for many years. Most third party certificates are obtained from Verisign and its subsidiaries. Apart from its premier "Verisign" brand, Verisign retains several other major brands, including its subsidiary Thawte (Thawte was originally a separate company, which was bought by Verisign in 1999), and the Equifax brand (from the acquisition of GeoTrust in 2006).
Godaddy are the second largest issuer of certificates having entered the SSL market by buying Starfield. Comodo is the other prominent international certificate issuer; like Verisign, Comodo issues certificates under multiple brands. There are other issuers that confine their business to particular countries or regions; Germany is a good example, where there are two big authorities which do not appear elsewhere. Per-country breakdowns by certificate authority are available on the geographical analysis pages.
Summary
The numbers of SSL sites using third party certificates continues to increase at around 30% per annum. End-users, while not understanding the ins-and-outs, have come to recognise the padlock in their browser as one indication that a site is safe to exchange confidential information. While recent problems with online fraud and phishing are challenging the IT industry to produce a more complete framework of security for non-technical users, it is clear from the continued growth of HTTPS use that SSL is still considered to be part of the solution for secure, online transactions.
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