Huh. I didn't know that, as I only have ever done the individual verification. It's not uncommon for someone to wear many hats (i.e., to be affiliated with several organizations). It'd certainly be nice if their system allowed for a single individual account to switch between different "identities", so that one could issue certs for themselves or any number of organizations with which they're affiliated and which they've validated with StartSSL.

Have you suggested such an improvement to them?

Technically, yes, but policy-wise, no: Class 1 certs are not intended for commercial use.

It's hard to directly compare the two offerings, as StartSSL charges for validation but you can issue numerous certificates at no additional cost. Other CAs charge on a per-cert basis.

As you suspected, the $9 offering from PositiveSSL is for a single, non-wildcard, non-SAN certificate. NameCheap also sells Comodo PositiveSSL multi-domain certs for $30/year for up to 100 domains, which is quite a reasonable price. Of course, those certs are domain-validated only. Organization-validated multi-domain certs start at $90/year. That's cheaper than StartSSL, but only gets you a single cert with multiple SANs. If you needed more than one, StartSSL is the more economical choice. Wildcard certs are also available, with Comodo wildcards costing $94/year.

Switzerland. The trains are great but the beer's bloody expensive.

Did you include the necessary intermediate certificates in your server config? If you don't then browsers can't verify that the cert is legit. IE tries to be smart and can download many (but not all) intermediates automatically, but that's not something you should rely on.

I have never had any issues with PositiveSSL using any browser, so long as the intermediates are sent by the server.

Yeah. Beer in Switzerland isn't cheap. :/

It's difficult to strip HTTPS from sites that use HSTS. Considering that enabling HSTS is literally a one-line addition to a server's config file and prevents SSL stripping attacks, it'd be silly not to use it.

Assuming the client can access the authentic HTTPS-secured, HSTS-enabled site at least once, their browser will cache the "HTTPS is required" bit for as long as the site requests. Most deployment guides suggest HSTS cache times of 6-12 months, which would make an attackers job much more difficult.

Adding browser support for DANE would be even better: HSTS allows a server to instruct a browser to only use HTTPS on that site, while DANE allows the server to specify (via a valid DNSSEC-signed record) which HTTPS certificate/CA (including self-signed certs) is valid for that site. Using both methods provides a high degree of assurance that one is securely visiting the authentic site and that no tampering is taking place.

IP-based SSL hosting hasn't been necessary since the development of SNI nearly a decade ago.

Essentially all modern browsers (IE 7+, Firefox 2.0+, Chrome 6+ on XP [all versions of Chrome on Vista+ support SNI], Safari in iOS 4+, Android 3+, WP 7+, etc.) and servers support SNI.

Several web hosts offer SNI-based SSL/TLS hosting at no additional charge.

StartSSL offers completely free-of-cost certificates that are widely recognized by browsers to individuals and non-commercial sites. $60/year gets you an ID-verified account and the ability to offer unlimited certificates (they only charge for the validation, certificates are free). A second $60 ($120 total) gets your organization verified, again with the ability to issue unlimited certs.

Let's Encrypt, run by the EFF, will be offering free certificates (starting in 2015) with an easy automatic validation and installation system that makes the technical side of deploying certs super easy.

If, for some reason, that's not satisfactory, Comodo resellers like NameCheap offer PositiveSSL certs for less than $9/year. That's less than a beer at the local bar.

The financial cost of getting a certificate is essentially negligible.

Some folks at Belgacom may disagree.

Remember, SSL/TLS doesn't just protect the privacy of communications, it also protects the integrity of those communications and makes it much more difficult for an adversary to modify the traffic to insert hostile content.

SNI requres support from (a) the browser, and is near-universally supported by all browsers these days and (b) the web server, with many hosts supporting it already. If not, they should.

The certificate authority is not involved with SNI at all.

It's from Team Fortress 2's "Meet the Soldier" trailer.

From the summary: "While this makes VeraCrypt slightly slower at opening encrypted partitions..."

On my 2.4GHz, 4-core, 8-thread i7-3630QM mounting an encrypted partition using VeraCrypt takes ~18 seconds. It takes the VeraCrypt bootloader more than 40 seconds to verify my password and proceed with booting.

Although one need only enter the boot password once at boot time, it's still a bit of a pain. A 1-5 second processing delay is reasonable, but more than 40 seconds? Either way, a few thousand iterations combined with a strong password makes brute-force guessing impractical so why bother with obscenely high iteration counts?

I'd much rather that VeraCrypt (or other similar software) allow one to set the number of iterations so one could set the desired delay time based on their own hardware and threat model, and have the iteration count written to the disk so the software knows how many iterations to use. For me, I use such software to protect against theft by ordinary criminals: they're not going to bother decrypting the drive, so a second or two of iterating is fine. Those defending against more well-funded adversaries would be better served with more iterations.

See https://blog.cloudflare.com/inside-shellshock/.

Cost is an issue if you're buying VeriSign certs for hundreds of dollars, but why waste your money? (Answer: nobody got fired for buying VeriSign, and big companies think customers care about the "trust seals"). Other CAs offer OV or EV certs for less than $200/year.

DV certs are incredibly cheap. StartSSL offers DV certs for non-commercial purposes free-of-charge. For paid certs, they only charge for what costs them money: ndividuals can get their ID verified for $60/year and issue unlimited Class 2 certs. Organizations pay $120 (one individual verification, plus the organization verification) and can issue unlimited certs. Gandi offers DV certs (they're a Comodo reseller) for $16/year. NameCheap (a reseller of several CAs) has even lower prices: Comodo certs are $9/year, while RapidSSL certs are $10.95.

I hardly consider $9/year to be a showstopper for even the most cash-strapped business or small organization.

That said, you do have a point in regards to complexity: generating certs using command-line tools is not something the typical user can be expected to do, particularly with subtleties like adding the right flag for SHA2 signatures, configuring their server with good ciphersuites, etc. Heck, I routinely see professionally-managed websites with SSL cert chains missing the intermediate cert. Security is complex and can only be simplified so much, but it's still an issue.

Several email services (e.g. Gmail, Yahoo, etc.) do just that: they can send voice calls or SMS messages to a phone number you've registered with them prior to the loss of your account.

Due to the importance of email addresses when it comes to authentication (e.g. password resets for non-email services are nearly always sent to one's email address) it makes sense to have email services be secure from compromise (e.g. 2FA) and recoverable in a secure manner (e.g. phone-based validation).

Domain names are also a "high-stakes" thing and it makes sense to have a high degree of security when allowing password resets at registrars: I wouldn't mind my domain registrar sending me a letter by post to my address on file with them if I were to ever request a password reset from them.

Google has many datacenters, including three in Europe. Alas, due to Google not providing reverse DNS on a lot of their router hops I'm not sure quite where the traces end up, but they're only ~30ms away from Bern, so the connection is definitely routed to their European facilities.

As for Netflix, their European service seems to be run from the Amazon AWS facility in Ireland, so there's no transatlantic links to cross. I imagine they also offer their CDN equipment to European ISPs, but they don't offer Netflix in Switzerland yet, so I don't know if that's the case here. I subscribe to the US Netflix and use Unlocator to trick their location-detection system into thinking I'm in the US, so the videos I watch do cross the Atlantic. There's maybe 10 seconds of lower-resolution video when streams from US Netflix first start, but after that things are in HD quality for the duration. No issues otherwise.