25 posts tagged security

Today, the U.S. Digital Service and 18F are excited to announce the launch of login.gov, a single sign-on solution for government websites that will enable citizens to access public services across agencies with the same username and password.

In 2015, the White House Office of Management and Budget released M-15-13, a "Policy to Require Secure Connections across Federal Websites and Web Services" the memo emphasizes the importance of protecting the privacy and security of the public's browsing activities on teh web. This is a guest post by Karim Said of NASA who was instrumental in NASA's successful HTTPS and HSTS migration.

Cameron Dixon at the Department of Homeland Security writes for 18F: To facilitate secure connections for citizens, immigrants, and other users, the Department of Homeland Security began delivering 'HTTPS Reports' directly to federal agencies. We open-sourced the tool we scan with, in collaboration with our colleagues at 18F.

The White House HTTPS policy generated significant HTTPS adoption in the U.S. government. HTTPS is now used for most web requests to executive branch .gov websites, and the government now outpaces the private sector on HTTPS.

We’ve published a vulnerability disclosure policy for 18F's parent organization, GSA's Technology Transformation Service, which lays out rules of the road for reporting vulnerabilities to various TTS-operated systems. We want a clear path for security researchers to tell us about vulnerabilities on our systems, and to assure those researchers that we won’t pursue legal action against them.

Today the General Services Administration’s Office of Inspector General (an independent part of our agency, entrusted with carefully inspecting agency operations) published a report on a mistake made in the configuration of Slack, an online chat tool we use. We discovered and remedied this issue a couple of months ago. We did a full investigation and to our knowledge no sensitive information was shared inappropriately.

18F is working iteratively with a team of technologists from across the government to build a platform for users who need to log in to government services. Every consumer-facing service the government offers will benefit from this platform, enhancing the privacy and security of online interactions for the public and for agencies.

Four weeks ago, we announced cloud.gov, a new platform that will enable small federal teams to rapidly develop and deploy web services with best-practice, production-level security and scalability. Currently, we’re running a small pilot program to prepare to open up cloud.gov to all federal agencies. In the meantime, we’d like to lay out some more details about the project and answer some common questions.

What if we told you that most catastrophic digital security vulnerabilities had one common denominator? One overriding contributor to root causes? Would you believe that one factor is also the biggest impediment to great design and software? That one thing? Complexity.

We’ve developed cloud.gov, a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), to tackle core infrastructure issues and enable our small development teams to improve the delivery of 18F products.

18F uses HTTPS for everything we make, and the U.S. government is in the process of transitioning to HTTPS everywhere. As part of this effort, we've recently partnered with DigitalGov University to produce a two-video series introducing the why's and how's of HTTPS.

Today, the White House's Office of Management and Budget (OMB) finalized an HTTPS-Only Standard for all publicly accessible federal websites and web services. This standard is designed to ensure a new, strong baseline of user privacy and security across U.S. government websites and APIs.

We love when we're able to contribure to open source projects from other organizations. Recently, we contributed to Bitly's open source google_auth_proxy to support our Hub and MyUSA applications, and our contribution has already helped other OAuth2 providers.

The U.S. federal government is launching a new project to monitor how it's doing at best practices on the web. A sort of health monitor for the U.S. government's websites, it's called Pulse, and you can find it at pulse.cio.gov.

If you’re a small-business owner, a veteran, or simply a person interested in tracking the status of your tax return, you’ve likely interacted with multiple government websites, which can require you to fill out a lot of forms and juggle a lot of information. Soon, you’ll be able to use MyUSA — a service that makes government resources easier to access, and government tasks and processes easier to keep track of.

Today, the White House's Office of Management and Budget is releasing a draft proposal for public comment: The HTTPS-Only Standard, at https.cio.gov. This proposal would require all new and existing publicly accessible federal websites and web services to enforce a secure, private connection with HTTPS Feedback and suggestions during this public comment period are encouraged, and can be provided on GitHub or by email.

Every .gov website, no matter how small, should give its visitors a secure, private connection. Ordinary HTTP (http://) connections are neither secure nor private, and can be easily intercepted and impersonated. In today's web browsers, the best and easiest way to fix that is to use HTTPS (https://).