Twitter Implements Forward Secrecy; Says It 'Should Be The New Normal'

from the protecting-your-privacy dept

There's been a lot of talk recently about getting more web companies to look at using forward secrecy to make HTTPS connections even more secure. That link from Parker Higgins at EFF explains the basics. It appears that folks at Twitter were paying attention, as they've now announced how they've implemented forward secrecy to better protect privacy. In practical terms, this means that if someone (hello NSA peoples!) is recording all encrypted traffic today, and then are later able to crack or steal Twitter's private encryption keys, they shouldn't be able to go back and decrypt the stored data. That's as opposed to the way many now implement security, in which if the key gets out, it's basically game over for privacy on previously encrypted files.

The Twitter blog post on this actually goes into a fairly detailed discussion about the technology choices they made, and the trade-offs involved. It's pretty clear this wasn't just written by a PR person. That said, security researcher Nicholas Weaver notes some potential issues with Twitter's transport encryption choices, noting that there are some indications that RC4 is no longer secure, even when used in TLS. Hopefully further changes can make it even more secure.

That said, the Twitter blog post makes a key point towards the end, about how greater and greater security, especially against the ability of an entity like the NSA, needs to be "the new normal."

At the end of the day, we are writing this not just to discuss an interesting piece of technology, but to present what we believe should be the new normal for web service owners. A year and a half ago, Twitter was first served completely over HTTPS. Since then, it has become clearer and clearer how important that step was to protecting our users’ privacy.

If you are a webmaster, we encourage you to implement HTTPS for your site and make it the default. If you already offer HTTPS, ensure your implementation is hardened with HTTP Strict Transport Security, secure cookies, certificate pinning, and Forward Secrecy. The security gains have never been more important to implement.

Filed Under: encryption, forward secrecy, https, privacy, rc4, security, tls
Companies: twitter