A few years ago, I wrote a post about “the power of s” explaining how important it is to use https instead of http, and how that made things more secure. Strictly speaking, what I wrote then was true. It’s very important to implement SSL, and SSL can indeed make communications secure. But it’s more complicated than that. SSL is an excellent tool which allows secure communication if it is implemented correctly. A bad implementation, however, is no more secure than sending data via clear text. And it’s awfully easy to have a bad implementation.

Ciphers are a good place to start. A cipher is the method used to encrypt a message. It’s the basis for most of what we tend to think of as security. But not all ciphers are created equal. Some are simply not secure. DES, for example, while having no particular vulnerabilities, does not allow a long enough key to be secure with modern computing. Not coincidentally, this problem with DES demonstrates that even a secure cipher like AES can be rendered ineffective if an inadequate key length is chosen. Figuring out what key length – and comparing key lengths – takes in-depth understanding of the cipher in question: 3DES with a 128-bit key is comparable (though not equal) to RSA with a 2048-bit key!

After ciphers, there are hashes, message digests, and signatures. These authenticate a message and assure that, encrypted or not, a message came from the source which it claims to have come from and that the message was not altered in transit. These are all crucial for preventing “man in the middle” attacks by which a third party can take over communication. As with the ciphers themselves, the algorithms used here are very important, and many have been proven to be insecure.

On top of that, there is the matter of certificates. Certificates play an important role in proving the identity of each end of the communication, and determining who to trust. However, recent events have proven that the certificates themselves can be insecure, either due to poor design or compromise of the certificate authority.

These are the basic concerns entailed in implementing SSL. Would that it were really so simple. Unfortunately, the real world throws in greater complications. The truth is that implementing SSL properly relies on the options made available by the hardware and software vendors. They may not have implemented every possible cipher; it may not be possible to load custom certificates. The certificates in use may not be able to negotiate shared keys… the list goes on. And that assumes using something like a unified solution. Inevitably, almost any IT environment becomes a heterogeneous environment. There is always a particular piece of the puzzle – firewall, a management tool, a server – that simply must be from some other vendor. And these parts don’t always work well together; often the only option by which products from two different vendors can communicate at all turns out to be decidedly less than secure. On top of that, even if secure options are available, and all the various parts can use the same ciphers and other components, there’s the administrative overhead: sure, it’s possible for each SAN switch to have a certificate, but do you have the resources to administer certificates on more than 500 of them?

The more I’ve learned about SSL, the more I realize how difficult it is to truly engineer a secure solution. Doing so can require fundamental and sweeping changes to an IT infrastructure and may take months or more to enact. Of course, anyone who cares about security should implement some form of security – but it’s important to remember that not only is it not as simple as changing an option in a control panel, it’s often as difficult as engineering the infrastructure in the first place.