English

Office 365 users will get unlimited storage

Some months ago Microsoft announced some changes for its Office 365 subscribers, those who would gain 1 TB of OneDrive storage for Home, Personal and University plans. Today they announced that they would begin to roll out unlimited storage for these plans over the next weeks, but you can click here to get some preferential treatment. Chris … Leer másOffice 365 users will get unlimited storage

It’s time to replace SHA-1 certificates

It has been 20 years since SHA-1, the world’s most used encryption method, was released.

SHA-1 is an encryption method developed by the National Security Agency of the United States and is considered a federal information processing standard for the Government of that country. The method of output of SHA-1 produces a 160 bits (20 bytes) secure hash value, equivalent to an hexadecimal number of 40 digits long.

In 2005 were published two investigations in which big vulnerabilities in this mechanism were demonstrated. It happens that the hashes have a natural enemy called “collisions”. Collisions are the possibility of encountering an identifier that is notunique, i.e. that a same SHA-1 represent two different incoming data flows through brute force attacks.

By definition, we could say that there is 1 chance in 1208925819614629174706176 (280) of generating collisions in SHA-1. However, at the beginning of 2005, a group of Chinese researchers reduced the number of attempts to 269. Finally, researches of the Macquarie University of Australia were able to reduce it to 252 (about 2000 times faster than expected).

As a result, the CA/Browser Forum recommended in 2011 start to leave SHA-1 as soon as possible. In fact, the Government of the United States stopped using this mechanism in 2010.

About SHA-2

Leer másIt’s time to replace SHA-1 certificates

Google to rank up HTTPS sites in search results

Versión en español disponible aquí / Spanish version available here

Gary Illyes and Zineb Ait Bahajji, from the Google’s Webmaster Trends Analysis team, published yesterday a post in the company’s security blog announcing that sites that are protected with SSL certificates will be ranked up in search results.

“Security is a top priority for Google”, ensures the announcement in which the company based in California gave more details about this change. With the aim of improve users experience and security, Google has started to test this new ranking model some weeks ago.

TLS, or Transport Layer Security, is a cryptographic protocol designed to provide communication security over the Internet. Also known as “HTTPS” or “secure HTTP”, TLS and its predecessor (SSL) were designed to allow users to exchange data with web-sites safely.

Tests suggest that, so far, only 1% of global queries were affected. Google plans to start rolling this feature accross the web in the next weeks, in order to allow webmasters to switch to HTTPS.

In the coming weeks, the Google team will publish detailed best practices to make TLS adoption easier, and to avoid common mistakes. Here are some basic tips to get started:

Leer másGoogle to rank up HTTPS sites in search results