ParentPay won’t support “insecure” browsers

This week that ParentPay, the Microsoftie payment system used by many schools, rolled out a web site update to support an even more limited range of browsers. This included dropping support Internet Explorer before 9 for “security reasons”.

By coincidence, in the same week Microsoft trumped their loyal fanobois at ParentPay by announcing that everything prior to version 10 was hereby deemed unsafe. ParentPay has yet to comment.

However, the notion that any version of Internet Explorer is “safe” is stretching the truth badly. All the mainstream browsers are dodgy; they all support unsafe scripting and embedded code. Microsoft may have the worst reputation, but they’re all undermined by their code and add-ons – and host operating system, to be fair. Only a few niche browsers, that don’t support things like JavaScript and ActiveX, can be considered safe; and those are the ones that ParentPay refuses to support because they don’t allow “rich content”. (And their developers are Microsoft fans). It’s definitely a case of form over security, yet again.

As an illustration of just how feeble their new browser support policy is, here’s a list  of those they’ll accept, taken from their web site:

  • Chrome 35 or higher
  • Firefox 30 or higher
  • Internet Explorer 9 or higher
  • Safari 6 or higher.

The the the the That’s All Folks!

Schools should be seriously considering their relationship with ParentPay, given the cost and inconvenience they’re forcing parents to go through in order to use it. Analysis of the traffic across my servers suggest that IE has around a third of the browser market. Of these, more than half are using IE 9 or earlier.

ParentPay’s assertion that this will only affect a “..small proportion of parents” may be literally true, but it’s disingenuous. Let’s do some simple arithmetic. Say there are 1500 parents in a secondary school. A third of these use IE – that’s 500. Half of these use an old IE (on an old PC) – that’s 250/1500 parents at each school who’ll be grossly inconvenienced. Cancel the fraction out and it’s 1/6, which could be described as a small proportion, but it’s still 250 per school.

The number of people who would be using”unsupported” browsers on tablets or mobile devices is probably very high. Anecdotally, parents have access to a PC somewhere that they currently have to go to in order to use ParentPay. Many would rather use a tablet.

It’s about time someone set up an alternative to ParentPay and schools were educated in to the benefits of open standards.

Internet Explorer scare

I’m getting a lot of calls about Internet Explorer. Apparently it’s got another security bug. It must be true because it was on the BBC.

Well it’s partly true. The bug is actually in ActiveX, which is Microsoft’s dodgy web browser application format. All browser application formats are dodgy. Allowing web sites to download code and run it on your PC is just a bad idea.

I’ve said it before and I will say it again: just turn off ActiveX. That said, looking at the details of this particular vulnerability it doesn’t appear very easy to exploit. I suspect it’s getting more of a mention than it deserves as Microsoft isn’t going to patch it for IE6 or Windows XP for the first time, or so they say.

Hmm. What can Microsoft be thinking? Either they patch this regardless, or lose a further share of the browser market to Chrome – and another nail in the coffin of Active-X.

 

Internet Explorer – new vulnerability makes it just too dangerous to use

There’s a very serious problem with all versions of Internet Explorer on all versions of Windows. See here for the osvdb entry.

In simple terms, it involves pages with Flash content, and all you’ve got to do is open a page on a dodgy web site and it’s game over for you. There’s no patch for it.

Microsoft’s advice can be found in this technet article. It’s pathetic. Their suggested work-around is to deploy the Microsoft Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit (EMET). Apparently this is a utility that “helps prevent vulnerabilities in software from successfully being exploited by applying in-box mitigations”. Microsoft continues “At this time, EMET is provided with limited support and is only available in the English language.”

Here’s my advice – just don’t use Internet Explorer until its been fixed.

Update

21-Sep-12

Microsoft has released a fix for this. See MS Security Bulletin MS 12-063.

If you have a legitimate copy of Windows this will download and install automatically, eventually. Run Windows Update manually to get it now – unfortunately it will insist on rebooting after installation.

 

Certificate “Errors” on Internet Explorer 9 – and how to stop them

Like recent versions of Internet Explorer, Version 9 has a Microsoft-style way of handling SSL certificates. It won’t let lusers access anything over a secure connection if there’s anything wrong with the certificate the remote end has presented. On the face of it, this is all very reasonable, as you don’t want the lusers being tricked by nasty criminals. But in reality it’s not as simple as that.

A bit of background, because everyone should make an informed choice about this…

SSL (or TLS) has two purposes – authentication and encryption. When you send data over SSL then two things occur. Firstly it’s only readable by the receiving computer (i.e. it’s encrypted), and secondly you know you’re talking to the right server (the link is authenticated – both computers recognise each other). The computers don’t exactly exchange passwords, but they have a way of recognising each other’s SSL certificate. Put simply, if two computers need to talk they have a copy of each other’s certificate stored on their disk  and they use to make sure they’re not talking to an impostor (gross over-simplification, but it’s a paradigm that works). Should one computer not have the certificate needed to authenticate the other end it will be supplied, and this is supplied certificate is checked to see if its “signed” by an “signing authority” using a certificate it does already have has. In other words, the unknown remote certificate arrives and the computer checks with a “signing authority” certificate to see if it’s been signed, and is therefore to be trusted. If it’s okay, it’s stored and used.

Now here’s where it breaks in Microsoft-land: For your computer’s certificate (the one it sends) to be signed by a “signing authority”, money has to change hands. Quite a lot of money, in fact. If it’s not signed, the recipient will have no way of knowing it’s really you.

In the rest of the world (where SSL came from), on receipt of an unknown certificate,  you’d see a message saying that the remote computer says it can be recognised using the supplied certificate, but I’ve never seen it before: Do we trust it? In most cases the answer would be “yes” and the two computers become known to each other on subsequent connections. It’s okay to do this – it’s normal. Something like this happens on Windows with Firefox and other browsers, but not, apparently, Internet Explorer. Not until you did a bit deeper, anyway. Actually, Internet Explorer 9 can be made to recognise unsigned security certificates, and here’s how.

First off, we really need to know what we’re about to do. What are the symptoms? The address bar goes red and you get a page saying there’s a problem with the certificate every time you visit a “site”. You can click on something to proceed anyway, but the implication is that you’re heading for your doom. The “error” message you see is normally for one of three reasons, and reading it might be enlightening. On a bad day you might get all three! But taking them in turn:

“The security certificate presented by this website was not issued by a trusted certificate authority.”

This just means that no one has paid to have this certificate signed by anyone of Microsoft’s liking. It may be a private company-wide certificate, or that belonging to a piece of network equipment such as a router. If it’s a web site belonging to your bank or an on-line shop, then you should be worried! Otherwise, if there’s a reason why someone isn’t paying to have their certificate approved (indirectly) by Microsoft, make your own decision as to whether you trust it.

So how do you get around it? Actually it’s pretty simple but Microsoft aren’t giving out any clues! The trick is to run Internet Explorer as Administrator (not just when logged in as Administrator).  In current versions of Windows you do this by right-clicking on IE in the start menu and selecting “Run as Administrator” from the pop-up menu. If you don’t, the following won’t work.

Go to the site who’s certificate you wish to import, and proceed to view the site in spite of the warnings. Then in the address bar you’ll see “Certificate error”. Click on this and you’ll see an option to “View Certificate”, and (assuming you’re in Administrator mode) there’s be a button the “General” tab to “Install Certificate”. Follow the prompts. For maximum effectiveness(!) choose the option to “Place all certificates in…” and browse to the “Trusted Root Certification Authorities”. This probably isn’t necessary in most cases, but if you do this it’ll cover you for pretty much every use. Your PC will happily accept anything from the remote machine hereafter; so make sure you’re importing the right certificate!

“The security certificate presented by this website has expired or is not yet valid.”

This means the certificate is out-of-date, or exceptionally, too new. In most cases encountering a certificate that isn’t valid suggests that your computer’s clock has reset itself to 1980. If this sounds plausible, just proceed to use the certificate anyway (there’s a clear option on the screen to do this). You’ll still get a scary red address bar, then it’s up to the server operator to fix this, but before you get on the ‘phone and give them what for, make sure you’re computer’s idea of the time and date is actually correct.

“The security certificate presented by this website was issued for a different website’s address”

This third case is a bit more tricky. Basically the name of the computer is embedded into the certificate, but you might be referring to it by another name (i.e. an alias). Or it could be using a pinched certificate. If you’re talking to a network router like a Draytek 2820 by going to its IP address and it’s giving you a built-in certificate, it would have no way of knowing what name or address the router is ultimately going end up on. The certificate is bound to be wrong in this respect. However, fishing around in the Internet Explorer options, under Advanced (and right down near the bottom) there’s a check-box – “Warn about certificate name mismatches”. Un-check it and it’ll stop squawking. Unfortunately it’s either on or off; you can’t set it to ignore a mis-match for particular names only. Because of the risk that someone might be impersonating your bank, you’d probably be best to leave this one checked and put up with the red warnings.

Final word of warning

Some people reading this will reckon this advice is reckless. Why circumvent a security feature? Simple – if the authentication part of SSL isn’t working you still want it for the encryption. In an ideal world everyone would have signed certificates so you can verify everything you talk and know it’s what it claims to be the first time you meet it. Subsequent visits will be authenticated with your newly installed certificate, so if something turns up impersonating it alter it’ll be detected. In the real world you probably want your data encrypted regardless. A signed certificate is better, but not that much better.

Hassling everyone over security certificates, as Microsoft is doing, may be justifiable on some levels, but as far as I’m concerned, anything that makes the use of encrypted data paths more difficult or expensive to use than they need be is a bad thing. They’re throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

 

Google’s Evil Browser policy

Gmail Fail

Google’s VP of Engineering (Venkat Panchapakesan) has published one of the most outrageous policy statements I’ve seen in a long time – not in a press release, but in a blog post.

He’s saying that Google will discontinue support for all browsers that aren’t “modern” from the end of July, with the excuse that is developers need HTML5 before they can improve their offerings to meet current requirements. “Modern” means less than three versions old, which currently refers to anything prior to IE8 (now that IE 10 is available on beta) and Firefox 3.5. This is interesting – Firefox 4 has just been released, I’m beta testing Firefox 5 with Firefox 7 talked about by the end of 2011. This will obsolete last month’s release of Firefox 4 in just six months. Or does he mean something different by version number? Anyone who knows anything about software engineering will tell you that major differences can occur with minor version number changes too so it’s impossible to interpret what he means in a technical sense.

I doubt Google would be stupid enough to “upgrade” it’s search page. This will affect Google Apps and Gmail.

The fact is that about 20% of the world is using either IE 6 or a similar vintage browser. Microsoft and Mozilla have a policy of encouraging people to “upgrade” and are supportive of Google. Microsoft has commercial reasons for doing this; Mozilla’s motives are less clear – perhaps they just like to feel their latest creations are being appreciated somewhere.

What these technological evangelists completely fail to realise is that not everyone in the world wishes to use the “latest” bloated version of their software. Who wants their computer slowed down to a crawl using a browser that consumes four times as much RAM as the previous version? Not everyone’s laptop has the 2Gb of RAM needed to run the “modern” versions at a reasonable speed.

It’s completely disingenuous to talk about users “upgrading” – it can easily make older computers unusable. The software upgrade may be “free” but the hardware needed to run it could cost dear.

It’ll come as no surprise to learn that the third world has the highest usage of older browser versions; they’re using older hardware. And they’re using older versions of Windows (without strict license enforcement). There’s money to be made by forcing the pace of change, but it is right to make anything older than two years old obsolete?

But does Google have a point about HTML5? Well the “web developers” who’s blog comments they’ve allowed through uncensored seem to think so. But web developers are often just lusers with pretensions, fresh out of a lightweight college and dazzled by the latest cool gimmick. Let’s assume Google is a bit more savvie than that. So what’s their game? Advertising. Never forget it. Newer web technologies are driven by a desire to push adverts – Flash animations and HTML5 – everything. Standard HTML is fine for publishing standard information.

I’ll take a lot of convincing that Google’s decision isn’t to do with generating more advertising revenue at the expense of the less well-off Internet users across the globe. Corporate evil? It looks like it from here.