TLS 1.0

» see datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2246 as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

When the IETF took SSL 3.0 away from Netscape and standardized it in January 1999, it changed the name and very little else. RFC 2246 is the same handshake with tighter rules about padding and a different way of deriving keys, and the version number on the wire still says 3.1 to this day, because that is literally what TLS 1.0 is. TLS 1.1 followed in April 2006 with a fix for a specific attack and almost nothing else.

For most of two decades this was the thing between you and whoever was on the same network. Online banking and the first credit card forms anybody trusted both ran across a handshake designed in 1996 by a company that no longer existed.

The cryptography underneath aged badly in public. The handshake authenticated itself with MD5 and SHA-1 together, both of which were being demolished through the 2000s. The cipher suites were mandatory in ways that blocked anything modern, and the BEAST attack in 2011 made the cipher-block-chaining problem a news story rather than a paper. Each one got patched around in the libraries rather than fixed in the protocol.

~ the record ~

~ the coordinated date ~

On 15 October 2018 Apple, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla published their plans on the same day: TLS 1.0 and 1.1 would be disabled in all four browsers in early 2020. Nobody does this. Browser vendors remove things on their own schedules and let the web sort itself out, and a joint announcement with a shared deadline is an admission that no single vendor can carry the breakage alone.

There was a commercial deadline underneath it too. The PCI rules for handling card payments had already required merchants to move off TLS 1.0 by 30 June 2018, so the hard part of the migration was done in the places where money was involved. What was left on the old protocol by 2020 was embedded hardware and government portals that no longer had a maintainer.

~ the pandemic footnote ~

Firefox 74 shipped on 10 March 2020 with TLS 1.0 and 1.1 disabled, exactly as announced sixteen months earlier. Eleven days later Mozilla switched them back on remotely, in a release that had already gone out to users, with the explanation that it was reverting the change for an undetermined amount of time to better enable access to critical government sites sharing COVID19 information.

Google did the same arithmetic. The removal had been scheduled for Chrome 81 in March 2020 and was pushed back so that health and government sites would stay reachable during the first wave. It finally landed in Chrome 84 on 14 July 2020, with an enterprise policy that let administrators keep the old protocol alive until January 2021.

~ what it means for a protocol to die ~

RFC 8996, published in March 2021, is titled "Deprecating TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1" and says MUST NOT in the places where the old documents said MAY. That is the death certificate, and it was issued a year after the browsers had already done the killing.

I have been online since 1998, and this protocol is a few months younger than my first time online. Every padlock I ever looked at before about 2014 was this handshake, including every Turkish bank site I ever logged into, and the thing I find hard to get over is that it was never replaced because it broke. It was replaced because four companies agreed on a date.

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