Xolphin News

23 February 2017

SHA-1 certificates vulnerable to impersonation in theory is nothing new. Back in 2014, shifting to the new SHA-2 algorithm was already being encouraged. Today, a Dutch researcher cracked SHA-1 in practice. What does this mean? After years of research, Dutch researcher Marc Stevens from CWI Amsterdam (Research Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science) cracked the SHA-1 ...

Google requires Certificate Transparency

13 December 2016

Google recently announced they will make Certificate Transparency mandatory from October 2017. SSL certificates issued after this date have to comply to the Certificate Transparancy demands, otherwise they will be displayed as untrustworthy. What is Certificate Transparency? Certificate Transparency is an open source system that registers SSL certificates and was developed by Google since 2013. In the classic PKI model ...

Problems with GlobalSign certificates

13 October 2016

Problems arose today with GlobalSign’s SSL certificates. Visitors of websites secured with GlobalSign certificates may see incorrect errors informing them that the certificates have been revoked. Background The problem is caused by the fact that GlobalSign changed the way their root certificates are signed. By removing a connection between two of these root certificates, browsers see this as the ...

Google will label HTTP sites as non-secure from January

9 September 2016

Google has announced that it will be marking websites that process sensitive information without HTTPS as “non-secure” in Chrome from January 2017. This is part of Google’s goal to adopt HTTPS as the new standard. What will change, exactly? The security indicators have already been updated in the current version of Chrome, version 53, in order to more ...

Google changes icons in Chrome

7 September 2016

Research has shown that the current security indicators used by browsers to warn visitors against non-secure websites are not clear enough. Google will therefore introduce new icons for its Chrome browser. Chrome user statistics revealed that visitors did not respond (enough) to warnings. Warning the visitor against unreliable or non-secure websites is pointless if visitors do not understand ...

WHMCS module now available

29 August 2016

The Xolphin SSL Module for WHMCS makes it easy to sell, request and manage all types and brands of SSL certificates directly from WHMCS. The module is now available free of charge to all Xolphin resellers! What is WHMCS? WHMCS is a commonly used all-in-one tool for client management, invoicing and support for online organisations. WHMCS allows you ...

Xolphin SOAP API moved and expanded with REST and Comodo API

15 January 2016

To easily request and manage SSL certificates, you can use an API. In addition to the existing SOAP API, we now also offer a REST API and a Comodo API. You can also use webhooks to automatically report application status updates. Advantages of an API The major advantage of an API is that you can use it to order certificates ...

Browsers impose transition to SHA-2

14 January 2016

Google Chrome has announced that it will stop supporting the hashing algorithm SHA-1. SHA-2 is the follow-up to SHA-1 and set to become the new standard, since SHA-1 certificates are no longer considered to be secure. Google, Microsoft and Mozilla want to block SHA-1 from January 2017 at the latest, although they are considering ...