Once widely used, SHA-1 is considered insecure today and has been deprecated from the most common PKI use cases. OpenSSH recently provided a roadmap to its eventual deprecation of SHA-1. Join our hosts as they discuss the long, complex process of sunsetting a widely used cryptographic practice, the factors that contribute to these practices continuing beyond their secure lifespans, and the importance of crypto agility.

The recent expiration of Sectigo's AddTrust legacy root caused some systems to stop working and forced some admins to keep working over the weekend until all was fixed. In this episode we explain roots, root expirations, why they are a non event for most users, and why sometimes an expiration can be more impactful.

A new kind of identity certificate is coming that will enable businesses to include their logos in official email they send in order to improve customer confidence and protect against phishing. It is called a Verified Mark Certificate (VMC) and is built upon the DMARC standard, which controls which senders are allowed to send email using any given From address. In this episode our hosts explain VMCs and DMARC and how they will be used and then discuss where they fit in with S/MIME email certificates.

Mozilla has announced its intention to remove support for FTP from the Firefox browser, citing concerns about security and the degree of effort required to keep this functionality current. Join our hosts as they discuss this announcement and its potential effects as well as the considerations that go into choosing when to drop support for outdated, unpopular, or sub-optimal capabilities in technology products.

Congress's proposed EARN IT act has many industry observers worried about its potential effect on the integrity of encrypted communication. In recent news, secure communication app Signal has floated the idea of relocating outside the United States if that's what's required to retain its ability to offer end-to-end encryption without spying eyes interfering.

In this week's episode, we discuss this announcement and related issues surrounding the keeping of digital secrets and encryption.

For PKI to be secure, private keys need to remain private. In this episode we explain "vaulting" for keys or other shared secrets. We touch on the vulnerabilities that secrets vaulting fights against and the common use cases for vaulting.

One essential portion of the certificate lifecycle is the ability to revoke certificates. Public SSL certificates use a pair of mechanisms to communicate this revocation status to client machines, CRL and OCSP. In this episode we explain how these mechanisms work and some of their strengths and challenges.

With the global workforce's massive shift to work-from-home, a clever new set of opportunistic social engineering attacks has sprung up to take advantage of our unfamiliarity with our new communication and collaboration applications and processes. In this episode our hosts describe these new attacks and what IT departments can do to combat them.

As we plan our societal return to normalcy, a number of people and groups are discussing the concept of an electronic "immunity passport" that individuals can possess if they are known to be immune to COVID-19 (possibly through vaccination or prior infection). Today our hosts discuss the requirements for such an immunity passport, some of the opportunities and challenges in putting this kind of system in place, and how existing schemes and systems may fit into an immunity passport initiative.

Australia's Rabobank recently experienced an outage preventing its Android banking app from connecting to its servers. The root cause? An expired certificate. In this episode our hosts explain what happened and how it could have been avoided. They also discuss certificate pinning, how it came to be used with apps like this one, and its disadvantages.