Subject: Netcraft Secure Server Survey July 2016
From: Mike Prettejohn <[email-masked]>
To: Diana Marin Severino <[email-masked]>, Sue Coakley <[email-masked]>, Vijay NS <[email-masked]>, Sonya Perez <[email-masked]>, Eric Lipman <[email-masked]>, "Laura Aviles" <[email-masked]>, Jeffrey Whale <[email-masked]>, Alex Wong <[email-masked]>, "Landon Borup" <[email-masked]>, Alain Allen <[email-masked]>, Frank Agurto-Machado <[email-masked]>, "Charlene Mike-Billstrom" <[email-masked]>, Rick Andrews <[email-masked]>, Anna Sampson <
Date: Thu, 7 Jul 2016 16:27:35 +0000

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Netcraft Secure Server Survey July 2016

The Netcraft Secure Server Survey for July 2016 is now available.

You can find the data to which you subscribe at:

*       https://ssl.netcraft.com/surveys/analysis/https/2016/Jul/
*       https://ssl.netcraft.com/clients/iug3ore/symantec//Jul2016domain.csv.gz
*       https://ssl.netcraft.com/clients/iug3ore/symantec//Jul2016.csv.gz

July 2016 Highlights

July Trends

Netcraft's July 2016 SSL Server Survey found 5,516,471 distinct valid third-party certificates<https://ssl.netcraft.com/surveys/analysis/https/2016/Jul/glossary#valid_third_party>, representing a monthly gain of 188,016 (+3.5%).

Let's Encrypt gained a further 120,000 certificates in July, making up 64% of the total increase across all certificate authorities this month. This gain was enough to push Let's Encrypt into third place, with a total of 770,000 certificates.

GoDaddy has fallen to fourth place after losing 4,900 certificates since last month, and now has a market share of 13.52%. GoDaddy remains significantly ahead of fifth-placed GlobalSign, leading by 406,000 certificates and 7.35 percentage points of market share.

Comodo also grew significantly this month, increasing its total count of certificates by 56,000. Much of this growth can be attributed to its Western Digital and cPanel, Inc. sub-CAs . Due to the sheer volume of Let's Encrypt's growth, Comodo lost a very small amount of market share, dropping to 30.52%, despite having the second-largest absolute gain of certificates.

GlobalSign lost 4,900 certificates as 12,000 Shopify, Inc. web stores replaced GlobalSign certificates with ones issued by Let's Encrypt.

Within the DV market, Let's Encrypt now has slightly more than half as many DV certificates as the first-placed Comodo. Although Symantec only took second place in the DV market from GoDaddy last month, it has now been relegated to third place despite gaining 6,000 certificates and increasing its lead over GoDaddy to 25,000.

The DV market has seen significant change over the past 12 months: In the July 2015 survey GoDaddy was the largest issuer of DV certificates with a market share of 30.5% followed closely by Symantec and Comodo, and there were no Let's Encrypt certificates. There are now 1.8 million more DV certificates (+73.2%) with a majority of this growth focused in just two CAs: Comodo (+871,000) and Let's Encrypt (+770,000).

The Extended Validation market once again saw Comodo gain the most certificates with an increase of 494. Almost all of the top ten EV certificate issuers gained certificates this month with Network Solutions being the lone exception, losing 23. Symantec maintains its dominant market position at 48.4% market share.

Symantec continues to achieve the most estimated monthly revenue (using list prices<https://ssl.netcraft.com/surveys/analysis/https/2016/Jul/CMatch/pricing/>) from its certificates; it issued 87,000 certificates in March to give estimated monthly revenue of $28.9 million. Comodo issued more than twice as many certificates, 205,000, yet has significantly smaller estimated revenue of $18.9 million. A majority of Symantec's revenue is derived from the much more expensive Organisation Validated and Extended Validation certificates, markets in which Comodo plays a smaller part.

Comodo abandons attempt to trademark "Let's Encrypt"

In October 2015 Comodo filed three trademark applications for "Let's Encrypt", "Comodo Let's Encrypt" and "Let's Encrypt with Comodo". All three applications were abandoned on June 24th 2016 after Let's Encrypt publicly pleaded<https://letsencrypt.org//2016/06/23/defending-our-brand.html> for Comodo to abandon its trademark application. Let's Encrypt claimed its lawyers had been requesting Comodo drop its applications since March 2016 without success.

After Let's Encrypt's blog post was published, Comodo's CEO engaged with commentators on Comodo's forum<https://forums.comodo.com/general-discussion-off-topic-anything-and-everything/shame-on-you-comodo-t115958.0.html;msg837411#msg837411> alleging that Let's Encrypt had copied Comodo's 90-day certificate business model. Later in the same thread, Robin Alden confirmed that Comodo was intending to let the trademark application lapse and had no intention of pursuing them after Let's Encrypt became operational. He explained that "Josh [Aas, the ISRG Executive Director] was wrong when he said we'd 'refused to abandon our applications'. We just hadn't told LE we would leave them to lapse."

Let's Encrypt was officially announced in November 2014, almost a year before Comodo's trademark application. It issued its first certificate in September 2015, before it launched in April 2016 after a short public beta period.

ChaCha20-Poly1305 Cipher Suites

RFC 7905<https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7905>, published in June 2016, specifies seven new cipher suites for TLS that combine the ChaCha20 variant of the ChaCha stream cipher with the Poly1305 one-time authenticator method. The new cipher suites provide a replacement to the RC4 stream cipher which was prohibited for TLS<https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7465> in February 2015 on the grounds that it no longer provided a sufficient level of security.

Both ChaCha20 and Poly1305 are designed with high performance in mind and the combination of the two is reportedly comparable to RC4 in speed.

ChaCha20-Poly1305 isn't new; a draft specification<https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-agl-tls-chacha20poly1305-04> written by Google was published in November 2013 which proposed three cipher suites. The Chrome browser has contained support for this older version of the specification since November 2013 and CloudFlare began using it in February 2015. Some changes have been made over the course of the standardisation process which has now been completed and the RFC approved.

Apple updates App Transport Security

Apple announced at its Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) [slides]<http://devstreaming.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2016/706sgjvzkvg6rrg9icw/706/706_whats_new_in_security.pdf> that all App Store apps will be required to use App Transport Security from the start of 2017. ATS is designed to improve the security of apps by specifying minimum requirements<https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/General/Reference/InfoPlistKeyReference/Articles/CocoaKeys.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40009251-SW35> for the HTTP connections that they make.

ATS requires that all connections are HTTPS over TLS 1.2, that the cipher suite must support forward secrecy, and that the certificate must be signed using the SHA-2 hashing algorithm.

ATS was introduced with iOS 9 in September 2015 and is enabled by default although it is currently possible to specify that ATS should be disabled for connections to certain domains or disabled globally. After the end of 2016, exceptions to the fundamental aspects of ATS will only be granted to Apps with valid justification Ã¢Â€Â“ for example if you must communicate with a third-party service that you cannot control. Other exceptions, such as the requirement for perfect forward secrecy may be automatically approved. Apple also announced the introduction of support for Certificate Transparency. In order to enforce CT, the developer must specify a list of domains for which to require CT, and in order for the check to pass Apple require proofs from at least two CT logs.

StartCom launch and then retract StartEncrypt

On 6th June, StartCom announced StartEncrypt<https://www.startssl.com/NewsDetails?date=20160606>, a product designed to automatically acquire and install certificates using its StartAPI. On the 4th July, StartCom announced<https://www.startssl.com/NewsDetails?date=20160606> that StartEncrypt would be replaced with a new protocol based on ACME. ACME is undergoing IETF standardisation after being first used by Let's Encrypt.

StartAPI was launched at the end of April 2016 and allowed users to programmatically acquire certificates as well as complete the validation processes required to prove domain ownership. StartEncrypt was the official client application which was released just over a month later. The proprietary software can be used to obtain any class of certificate and install it automatically both on Windows and Linux servers.

A number of serious issues<https://www.computest.nl/blog/startencrypt-considered-harmful-today/> have already been discovered since the release of the initial version of the StartEncrypt client, these allowed a user to gain valid SSL certificates by tampering with the URL used to verify control of a domain. StartCom was quick to respond to this issue, taking the API offline on the same day that the issue was disclosed and issuing an updated client less than a week later.

The issues lay with the way in which ownership of the domain was verified. In order to prove domain ownership the user must upload a file to a specified path on the domain, but the path used could be specified by the user, the check also followed redirects and didn't verify the file type of the response it received. Combined these issues led to users being able to acquire a valid certificate for any website that allowed file uploading or contained an open redirect, examples include sites such as Dropbox, GitHub, Facebook, PayPal and Google. While the vulnerability was demonstrated with a proof of concept, there is no evidence that the API was mis-used or certificates issued for domains which the applicant did not control.

Another bug<https://www.startssl.com/NewsDetails?date=20160323> in the StartEncrypt system meant that certificates issued using the program were not logged to Certificate Transparency servers. StartCom had stated that all of its SSL certificates would be published to CT logs as of 23rd March.

Let's Encrypt leak user email addresses

On the 11th June an automated email script designed to alert users of an update to Let's Encrypt's subscriber agreement accidentally also leaked the email addresses of 7,617 users. The script prepended the email addresses of the users it had already emailed to the beginning of the message.

Let's Encrypt were alerted to the mistake 33 minutes after the emails began to send and subsequently stopped the script after it had sent 7,618 emails, 1.9% of the total it was expected to send.

An initial statement<https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/email-address-disclosures-preliminary-report-june-11-2016/16867> by Josh Aas the Executive Director of ISRG was published less than two hours after the incident originally occurred with a longer analysis<https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/email-address-disclosures-june-11-2016/17025> following on the 14th June.

Symantec acquire Blue Coat

Symantec has agreed to acquire the market leading web security company Blue Coat for $4.65 billion<https://www.symantec.com/en/uk/about/newsroom/press-releases/2016/symantec_0612_01>. The deal will see Blue Coat CEO Greg Clark appointed as the new CEO of Symantec, the post is currently vacant following Mike Brown's departure in April.

The acquisition will boost Symantec's enterprise security offerings and is expected to mean that 62% of the company's revenue<http://www.reuters.com/article/us-bluecoat-m-a-symantec-idUSKCN0YZ0BM> will be derived from the enterprise security market.

Blue Coat and Symantec recently made headlines<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/05/27/blue_coat_ca_certs/> after Symantec issued an intermediate CA certificate for Blue Coat Public Services. Blue Coat creates security systems that include the capability to man-in-the-middle encrypted traffic, designed for use in corporate networks. Some reports of the use of Blue Coat systems by foreign governments have prompted criticism, although Blue Coat has consistently denied having any direct involvement.

The existence of the sub-CA was incorrectly reported as allowing Blue Coat the ability to create trusted certificates for arbitrary domains; however, Symantec confirmed<http://www.symantec.com/connect/blogs/symantec-protocol-keeps-private-keys-its-control> that "private keys for the Blue Coat Intermediate CA were in Symantec's control at all times" and "the only certificates that could be issued from this Intermediate CA were limited solely to ones for the bluecoat.com domain.".

Other News

*       Microsoft update cipher suites<https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3161639> for IE and Edge.
*       Mozilla adding support for reading from Windows Cert Stores<https://cabforum.org/2016/05/25/2016-05/> to Firefox.
*       GitHub Pages officially support HTTPS<https://github.com/blog/2186-https-for-github-pages> and new sites enforce it.
*       Amazon is now HTTPS site wide.
*       UK government updates security guidelines<https://gdstechnology.blog.gov.uk/2016/06/28/updating-our-security-guidelines-for-digital-services/> to enforce HTTPS, HSTS and DMARC by October 2016.
*       Microsoft Edge adds support for TLS False Start and TCP Fast Open<https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2016/06/15/building-a-faster-and-more-secure-web-with-tcp-fast-open-tls-false-start-and-tls-1-3/>.

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