February 28, 2014 archive

How can we help make it easier for developers to learn how to add TLS (SSL) support to their applications?   If you’ve been following our work here at Deploy360 for a while, you know that part of our attention is focused on accelerating the deployment of DNSSEC and of technologies that help in securing BPG and Internet routing.

With DNSSEC, a great bit of our focus has been on the enormous potential of the DANE protocol to help make Internet connections using Transport Layer Security (TLS) more secure.  You already use TLS probably every day with your web browser… although you may know it more by its older name of “Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)”.  Any time you go to a website with a “https” at the beginning of a URL, or if you see a “lock” icon in many browsers, you are using TLS.   Any app developer using TLS is a great candidate to be using DANE.

But how do we get more developers using TLS to encrypt their connections and secure the data sent over those connections?

Around the time we were thinking about this, a new working group was launched within the IETF called “Using TLS in Applications (UTA)”.  This working group is chartered to create a set of “best practices” guides to help application developers know how to implement TLS in the best way possible to defend against attacks such as those outlined in draft-sheffer-uta-tls-attacks.  You can find out more about the UTA Working Group, including how to join the public mailing list, at these links:

• UTA Working Group charter
• UTA documents
• UTA mailing list and archive of mailing list discussions

It seemed to us that these documents being created within the UTA group were ones that should be shared widely.  I put some ideas forward on the UTA mailing list and received positive responses – and so we’re launching this new section of Deploy360 to help get that information out.  As the UTA working group publishes documents we’ll try to do what we can to help more developers and network operators learn about those documents.

To that end, I’ll also note that the UTA working group will be meeting this coming Friday, March 7, from 0900-1130 UTC at the IETF 89 meeting in London.  I wrote about this in my article yesterday about the DNS-related activities happening at IETF 89.  You can join the session remotely to listen in, so if this is of interest to you please do join.

Now, our “TLS for Applications” section here on Deploy360 will not be ONLY about the documents coming out of the UTA working group. We’ll also be finding the best documents and tutorials related to TLS that we can find out there on the Internet.  We’ve put up a content roadmap identifying the types of documents we intend to add to the site.

We’d love to hear your feedback about this new section of Deploy360. Do you see this as something that will be helpful to you?

How You Can Help

We need your help!  In order to provide the best possible resources to help application developers expand their use of TLS, we need to hear from you!  We need your feedback to help us know how we can best help you.  A few specific requests:

1. Read through our pages and content roadmap - Please take a look at our “TLS for Applications” page to understand what we are trying to do, and also please take a look at our content roadmap for BGP.  Are the current resources listed helpful?  Is the way we have structured the information helpful?  Will the resources we list on our roadmap help you make your routers more secure?

2. Send us suggestions – If you know of a tutorial, video, case study, site or other resource we should consider adding to the site, please let us know. We have a list of many resources that we are considering, but we are always looking for more.

3. Volunteer – If you are very interested in this topic and would like to actively help us on an ongoing basis, please fill out our volunteer form and we’ll get you connected to what we are doing.

4. Help us spread the word – As we publish resources and blog posts relating to adding TLS to applications, please help us spread those links through social networks so that more people can learn about the topic.

Thank you!  Working together we can make the Internet more secure!