ssl Archives - ClickedyClick

My previous post, titled SSL status of Taiwanese banks: a sad affair sparked a lot of visits and lot of discussion, clearly touching on something important. It was great to bring to light how well (or badly, in this case) these organizations are doing, as internet security should be one of their key focus.

Many of the organizations improved their setup since then, and it became quite troublesome to manually check each bank and each change, update the table and so on. It’s also good to have not just a snapshot in time, but a continuous record of how they were doing.

Thus I’ve hacked together some monitoring scripts, put the results online, and here’s the Taiwan Financial Institute SSL Status page.

TaiwanBankSSL — Click to check the current results

Page features include:

Automatically run once a day
Highlighting issues, showing grade evolution
RSS feed of grade changes
Automatic tweeting of daily status and changes as @twbankssl

This is quite a bit more than “minimal features”, but wanted to make something that is actually useful.

Today there was a story on Hacker News, how someone tweeting a screenshot of a bank’s SSL certificate got harassed by the bank in Greece. This got me thinking about the status of the banks here in Taiwan, especially how this place is so wired and online now. So I took a list of taiwanese banks and run each of their sites through the SSL Test. From past experiences I haven’t had my hopes up, but boy is the result ugly…

SSLTest_F — The usual result of this exercise

SSL Test Overview

I had a list of 43 banks, and for a quick overview I took into account a few key features only. The first is whether there are any active vulnerabilities against the site according to the test (these were mostly CRIME, FREAK, and POODLE attacks). The second is whether RC4 encryption was enabled, as it is now prohibited, and having it on is an automatic Payment Card Industry Data Security (PCI) compliance failure, according to one of the commenters. Other various warnings are mentioned when something really stands out, they are not crucial but more nice to have (though I’d contend that Forward Secrecy and HTTP Strict Transport Security is more than “nice” for anything financial).

Edit: Since publishing this post, there’s a brand new password recovery attack against RC4, so it’s even more urgent to switch it off.