South African Banks SSL Security

After coming across an article testing the security of the SSL implementations of Australian banks, I decided to run the same tests on the South African banks, using SSL Lab’s SSL Server Test. I have a little bit of inside info into some of the banks systems, so was not too surprised how bad the results were.

None of the banks score an A (they all fail with Forward Secrecy), but pick of the bunch was Capitec, whose only only other failing was using a relatively weak signature.

FNB is limited to a B by accepting the weak RC4 cipher, and Nedbank adds supporting only older protocols to the list of failings.

You’d hope for better security from banks, but the failings of Capitec, FNB and Nedbank are not too serious. On to the others…

Absa has all of the above failings, does not support secure renegotiation, uses the obsolete SSL3, and most dismally of all, is vulnerable to the POODLE attack against TLS servers.

Although Standard Bank also gets an F, it stands alone in the number of criteria it failed. It uses the even more old and insecure SSL 2, supports insecure Diffie-Hellman (DH) key exchange parameters, supports 512-bit export suites and might be vulnerable to the FREAK attack as well as being vulnerable to POODLE.

It’s quite astounding that Standard Bank may still be still vulnerable to the FREAK attack, which has been known about for over two months, and which is extremely serious.

These results match the banks scores in other areas as well, such as bank fees and customer satisfaction. So Standard Bank clients will be happy to know they’re not only with the least secure bank, but also with the most expensive and the one with the worst customer service.

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