Old encryption used in academic websites

Two of the premiere educational institutions of Europe are using very old SSL ciphers. I disallowed some old ciphers in Firefox and the sites started failing.

• https://isa.epfl.ch/imoniteur_ISAP/isacademia.htm

• https://domino.mpi-inf.mpg.de/internet/studies.nsf/Applicant

Firefox responds to fake certificate issue

Recently, we have seen false SSL/TLS certificate issued by DigiNotar causing trouble to a lot of people. The Tor project's blog describes it at length. Details of such vulnerabilities are detailed here. Firefox has been fast in responding to this. They have released an update which basically prevents its users from becoming a victim.

Social Web

Facebook and Twitter were accepted very fast and were milestones of social web. However, the recent discoveries of bugs raised questions on the security assured by these sites. Orkut at least says its a beta application; while facebook takes it a step further. Facebook users have to allow third party applications. Facebook is safe as the user made the choice of disclosing information to third party vendors.

Till that it was fine; but recently a bug was discovered in facebook chat that allowed users to view their friends' chats. Another bug was discovered in twitter that allowed users to have force followers. Now the web is undergoing a paradigm shift. However, these bugs remind us to remember the basics.

Watch this video to have glimpse of the paradigm shift.


Updates: Facebook issues
1. suspicious email guess
2. cross-site scripting
3. public updates are publicly searchable outside facebook
4. openbook [This should be enough evidence.]

Finally, people seem to notice.