In recent years we have heard a lot of news on the media and social media about Internet security issues. Who hasn’t heard on more than one occasion that someone has gotten the passwords of millions of users of a certain online music service, or internet email services or video game platforms… We’ve all wondered what this can happen and even some heroism can be seen in those who are told about it hackers. But what if the browsers we use from home or from the office weren’t very safe and we could also have some scares?
All of us who habitually talk about technological aspects associated with Information Technology and the Internet use a lot of weird words and acronyms that are impossible to understand. But there are a couple that will probably sound great in the coming months. When we access with our browser shopping pages via the Internet, e-mail, the financial institution where we have savings or the portals of various public administrations, communications are secure. A language is used between our browser and the pages we want to access securely. This language, or protocol in the technical language, is called HTTPS (see definition in the link http://ca.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTPS).
The HTTPS protocol, in turn, uses other protocols to establish the safest way to talk between the browser and the web page without anyone being able to "listen" to the information exchanged. The most common until recently is called SSL. It has recently been discovered to have vulnerabilities and is no longer fully secure. The problem is so important that major browser manufacturers have decided not to make efforts to fix it and recommend using only the TLS protocol. This TLS protocol is already a few years old, works perfectly and is completely secure in its latest version. The latest version available is TLS 1.2.
All of this would be perfect if it weren’t for the fact that only the latest versions of browsers and operating systems can work with this protocol. The compatibility table or array is huge and relates the operating system version, and its distribution to 32 or 64 bits, the browser version and even the Service Pack associated with it all. Although it is relatively complex to determine where our browsers would be, if we have updated our reference browsers to the latest version available and automated updates these problems disappear. Of course, the operating systems that are needed must also be modern and up to date.
If you want to know if you are ready or not for the changes that are coming you can go to the website https://www.howsmyssl.com and it will automatically give you a diagnosis. If you come up with something similar to the drawing that accompanies this writing.
If you want your browser to use only TLS, just type in any search engine you use: "Disable SSL" and you'll find a bunch of pages that tell you how to do it depending on the browser and the version you're using. Of course, consider that there are still web pages that do not support the TLS protocol but will probably indicate this when you try to connect.
