Mozilla plans to implement the next version of the TLS specification in an upcoming release of its Mozilla browser. TLS 1.3 will be shipped in Firefox 52, which is scheduled for release in March 2017.
Mozilla’s Martin Thomson said in an email to the Mozilla development group Wednesday that the company will include TLS 1.3 in Firefox 52. The newer version of the TLS specification is designed to address a number of security shortcomings of older versions and is considered to be much faster, as well.
“As of Firefox 52 I intend to turn TLS 1.3 on by default. TLS 1.3 has been developed using the existing security.tls.version.max preference to control maximum version,” Thomson said in the email.
“TLS 1.3 is the next version of TLS, the protocol that secures the web. TLS 1.3 removes old and unsafe cryptographic primitives, it is built using modern analytic techniques to be safer, it is always forward secure, it encrypts more data, and it is faster than TLS 1.2. TLS 1.3 also provides a 0-RTT mode which removes the round-trip of handshake latency.”
Nick Sullivan Podcast on Web encryption
Mozilla’s announcement about the upcoming implementation of TLS 1.3 comes a month after Cloudflare announced that it had turned on TLS 1.3 for all of its customers. The new version is both more secure and faster than older versions.
“TLS 1.3 embraces the “less is more” philosophy, removing support for older broken forms of cryptography. That means you can’t turn on the potentially vulnerable stuff, even if you try. The list of TLS 1.2 features that have been removed is extensive, and most of the exiled features have been associated with high profile attacks,” Nick Sullivan of Cloudflare said in a post in September.
“TLS 1.3 removes the ‘bad crypto smell’ of these legacy features, making it less likely that attacks on previous versions of the protocol will affect TLS 1.3. This streamlining also makes TLS 1.3 much simpler to configure for server operators. A secondary side effect of the update is that the protocol can be made much faster, resulting in a better web browsing experience.”
Image from Flickr stream of akamdar.
