Almost a third of HTTPS websites about to DROWN

The reason you might think SSLv2 is terrible is because it was a product of the mid-1990s, which modern cryptographers view as the dark ages of cryptography. Many of the nastier cryptographic attacks we know about today had not yet been discovered. As a result, the SSLv2 protocol designers were forced to essentially grope their way in the dark, and so were frequently devoured by grues -- to their chagrin and our benefit, since the attacks on SSLv2 offered priceless lessons for the next generation of protocols.

And yet, these honest mistakes are not worst thing about SSLv2. The most truly awful bits stem from the fact that the SSLv2 designers were forced to ruin their own protocol. This was the result of needing to satisfy the U.S. government's misguided attempt to control the export of cryptography. Rather than using only secure encryption, the designers were forced to build in a series of export-grade ciphersuites that offered abysmal 40-bit session keys and other nonsense. I've previously written about the effect of export crypto on today's security. Today we'll have another lesson.