TLS 1.3 has been the primary cryptographic protocol on the Seravo servers since the beginning of the year 2020. Also, we have TLS 1.2 in use. We have now reached the point where older versions TLS 1.1 and 1.0 will be phased out during March 2020.
This change may cause some issues if you are using an ancient browser or operating system (for example, Internet Explorer 9). Despite this, we’ve deemed it to be the time to streamline the cryptographic methods to fit the requirements of the present day. We’re not alone in this. For instance, Wikipedia has already stopped supporting these old protocols. If you can’t open Wikipedia with your browser, it surely is time to upgrade.
We will also be removing some old cryptographic algorithms from our service, ones that should no longer have any use. This change might affect both HTTPS and SSH connections to our service.
If you notice any problems with your connection to our service during March, try updating your software or get in touch with our customer service at help@seravo.com. Be sure to let us know what software and which version is causing you problems so we can troubleshoot whether our changes are the root cause of your problem.
What are HTTPS and TLS?
As you might know, HTTPS means a secure HTTPS connection. The actual protocol that makes the connection secure is, however, called Transport Layer Security or TLS (sometimes its predecessor SSL is mentioned). Security is an essential element: without it, it would be simple for someone eavesdropping to steal your username and password when you log in to a website. HTTPS is also vital these days because, without it, the site cannot use the fast HTTP/2 connection, which will affect your ranking on Google.
Several significant browser manufacturers announced already in 2018 that they will disable TLS 1.0 and 1.1 at the beginning of 2020. Most browsers have been talking with Seravo servers with TLS 1.2 and 1.3 for a good while now. Only older browsers that do not support the new protocol versions have had to resort to using the older versions.
We had a look at the situation at the beginning of this month and are happy to report that only 0.06% of the HTTP requests we receive use TLS 1.0 and 0.70% use TLS 1.1. TLS 1.2 covers 26.7% percent of the traffic, and TLS 1.3 is the clear winner with 66.2%. The rest of the traffic comes over vanilla HTTP, which fortunately is down to only 6.4%.
Seravo Takes Care of WordPress Security
As a Seravo customer, you don’t have to stress over the security of your website. Proactively taking care of details like this is the very definition of our upkeep service.
HTTPS has been a standard feature in our offering since day one to make sure that confidential information remains confidential. The popularity of older software out there has decreased enough that we can now make these changes without worrying about backward compatibility.