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So for the time being, our security efforts are focused elsewhere."Ī Microsoft spokesman declined to comment. It's still early days for, and there are site performance implications. (You can check if a Web site uses forward secrecy through Qualys' SSL Server Test or the GnuTLS utility.)Ī LinkedIn spokesman provided CNET with a statement saying: "At this point, like many other large platforms, LinkedIn had not enabled, although we are aware of it and keeping our eye on it. "What that means that these suites will probably almost never be used, and are there only for the rare case that there are some clients that do not support any other suites," says Ristic, Qualys' engineering director, referring to Facebook. Facebook has enabled some encryption techniques that use forward secrecy, but has not made them the default. The social network is already experimenting with forward secrecy on its public Web servers.

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Langley announced Google's adoption of forward secrecy, sometimes called perfect forward secrecy, in a 2011 blog post that said an eavesdropper able to break a master key "will no longer be able to decrypt months' worth of connections." The company also published the source code its engineers created using a so-called elliptic curve algorithm in hopes that other companies would adopt it too.įacebook is currently working on implementing forward secrecy and is planning to enable it for users soon, a person familiar with the company's plans said. "Forward security means you can't go back in time."

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It means, he says, an "attacker cannot use the same key to decode all past messages ever sent through those channels."Ī survey of major Web companies shows that only Google has configured its Web servers to support forward secrecy by default.įorward secrecy means an organization with the means to tap into Tier 1 Internet providers "can't decrypt previously recorded traffic," says Adam Langley, a software engineer at Google. Whitfield Diffie, shown here in 2010, co-authored a paper in 1992 describing a technique that has become known as forward secrecy.įorward secrecy is an "important technique" that all Web companies should adopt, says Dan Auerbach, a staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco. Through a bit of adroit mathematics that Whitfield Diffie and other cryptographers outlined in 1992, the Web e-mail or browsing session is believed to become impenetrable even to a government eavesdropper such as the NSA that can passively tap into fiber links. That vulnerability vanishes through forward secrecy's use of temporary individual keys, a different one for each encrypted Web session, instead of relying on a single master key. That creates an obvious vulnerability: an eavesdropper who obtains that master key can decrypt and peruse millions of supposedly private connections and conversations. Traditionally, "https" Web links have used a single master encryption key to encode hundreds of millions of user connections. Google, by contrast, adopted it two years ago. Lack of adoption by Apple, Twitter, Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL and others is probably due to "performance concerns and not valuing forward secrecy enough," says Ivan Ristic, director of engineering at the cloud security firm Qualys.
