ICPSR increases security of its web transactions

We'll be making a small, but important, configuration change on our web server this week. For a long time we've allowed so-called "weak" ciphers to be used with HTTP connections over SSL (aka HTTPS). This was good for web site visitors who had very old browsers; so old that the browser did not support stronger SSL ciphers. But it is bad news for most of us who are running more recent software since it would allow one to use less robust encryption when exchanging content via HTTPS.

We've been running this newer configuration for many months on a web server we use for staging new content. The many browsers and platforms we use to test new web pages and software work well with this configuration, and so we've decided to move it into the production environment.

Wikipedia has a nice page that describes the technical details behind the various ciphers that are used with SSL (and its successor TLS).