If you know about how TLS works, you know the system leans heavily on Certificate Authorities (CAs) to vouch for a server’s identity. That trust model works well most of the time, but it has a weak point: any CA in the hundreds trusted by your browser or operating system can issue a valid certificate…
Category: dns
What are CSRF tokens?
If you’ve ever dug into web security or looked through the source code of a login form, you’ve probably noticed a hidden field with a long, random-looking string tucked inside it. That’s a CSRF token — and while it might seem like a minor implementation detail, it’s one of the unsung heroes of web application…
Subject Alternative Names (SANs) in Digital Certificates
When it comes to digital certificates, the Subject Alternative Name (SAN) extension plays a crucial role in how modern systems authenticate and communicate securely. Although the Common Name (CN) field traditionally carried the hostname of a server, today it’s the SAN extension that browsers and applications actually pay attention to. In fact, industry standards have…
Transport Layer Security (TLS)
Transport Layer Security (TLS) is a cryptographic protocol that protects data when it is transferred between devices over a network. It is commonly used to secure web-based applications over the internet. Given the explosion in cloud services, mobile computing and IoT devices, the underlying technology to secure the data in transit has become of critical…
The rush towards public DNS
One result of the rush towards using large-scale public Domain Name Service (DNS) resolvers, such as Google and Cloudflare, is that critical and sensitive DNS queries are often handled by servers in different countries or even continents. This trend is introducing unexpected security, resilience, legal and data protection issues for policy makers and governments. With…
